Student Teaching Blog

This week I added language arts to my teaching load.  This is the subject I have been dreading.  Math is pretty cut and dry.  There is generally one concept or objective that we are working on for each period.  The plan is to do a whole group lesson followed by guided math groups and independent practice.  I can get creative in guided math lessons (i.e. games, activities, manipulatives, etc.)  However, the curriculum and standards are straightforward, and I see a path through them.  The lessons build upon each other in a flow.  In social studies, my district has six-week curriculum units including lesson plans that I am expected to follow.  There is some leeway here too, but because of the big project that all second graders have to do at my school at the end of each unit, much of what I need to do is mapped out and the common assessments are dictated by the curriculum.  So I can see the path in social studies too. Language arts, on the other hand, feels huge and overwhelming.  It

This week my second grade students continued to do “research” on countries for a Social Studies unit.  The reason I put the word research in quotation marks is that most of these children can barely read, so they are not really doing their own research.  The Social Studies curriculum for this district no longer uses textbooks for grade two, but instead features a series of six-week inquiry-based units (alternating with science).  This sounds good in theory, but in practice with this group of students it does not work.  I am not exaggerating when I say that some of these children can barely read.  Today I tested eight students on the Dolch pre-primer sight words (words to know before kindergarten).  Most of them appeared visibly stressed out by this quick assessment.  Only one student read all of the words.  One student read only twenty out of forty.  The rest were somewhere in the middle.  I know that my class contains mainly struggling reader and ELL students, and that is fin

This week was eventful for two reasons.  First, I took over social studies, so that now I am teaching math, social studies, and the weekly social emotional lessons.  After teaching my edTPA learning segment Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this coming week, I will be adding language arts.  The second reason it was an eventful week is that my students had their first math test. I think I was more nervous about the math test than my students were.  I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility for their learning, as I should.  This is compounded by the fact that most of my students are very low academically and not necessarily working at a second grade level.  I want to save them all and help them to become literate, mathematically capable, and excellent students.  I know these are lofty and idealistic goals.  These kids already have my heart and I really want them to succeed so they can build on what they learn as they get older.  Their tremendous struggles and lack of success

What a difference one week makes!  Last week at this time I was despairing because I had a bad experience teaching my first self-prepared lesson.  Today I can say I successfully prepared and executed three much better math lessons, and I also executed a scripted social emotional lesson and several phonemic awareness mini-lessons.  One of my math lessons was observed by my college supervisor, and this went very smoothly.  This week was so much better.  I have written the following in the inside cover of the notebook I write notes in at school: SCAFFOLDING MODELING KEEP IT SIMPLE SLOW DOWN Holding their hands, slowing down, and modeling are guiding my lesson plans and making me more successful.  I am learning that there is a big difference between the Trinity lesson plans that I wrote for fake students all throughout my cohort classes and the lessons I am creating for my real students in my classroom.  The lesson plans I wrote for my teacher education classes were cra

This week I took full control over the students’ daily math folder.  Each student has their own folder containing several plastic worksheet pages that they can write on each day using a dry erase marker.  Each day there is a new number of the day that is used as a basis of a number of math problems.  There is not much instruction for this.  I monitor the students while they are working on it with others at their table, helping and answering questions.  When most of them are done, I go through each page with the whole class using the projector so they can check their answers.  I also taught a social emotional lesson, which is done once a week, through a school mandated program called Second Steps.  These lessons are scripted and my CT advised me to stick to the script, as this is what the district demands.  The math folder lessons and the Second Steps lesson both went rather well. Today was interesting.  My CT was absent, which I had known in advance.  The sub was a retired and