Student Teaching Blog

I passed the edTPA.  I am not even excited.  I am simply  tremendously relieved.  I have a lot of substitute teaching prospects coming up, which is what I want right now.  I would like to have some flexibility in my schedule, as I have not been a very good and present mom to my own children over the past four months.  It will be nice to be able to chaperone a field trip or volunteer at their school occasionally. I am excited to have a job interview on Tuesday for a part time teaching assistant position at a local Catholic school.  It is a pull-out/push-in, extra help kind of situation.  The details are a little fuzzy, but I will learn more at the interview. I will be working with small groups and kids from second and third grade that need extra help two full days per week.  This is perfect, as I will be available to sub on the other days at other schools.  The assistant principal said that there will a maternity leave at the en...

This will be a shorter blog post because of a short school week.  Today was our only day of school.  Four out of our twenty students were absent.  The remaining sixteen students were pretty wound up.  The only academic things that transpired today were the regular math class, plus a lot of catching up on incomplete assignments.  There was no new instruction.  Students had both P.E. and art in the morning, and then an assembly and an hour of fun activities in the afternoon. Sometimes it is easy to forget how young these students are.  But there are some things that are always good reminders of their age.  One of thing that always reminds me of their youngness is their complete inability to comprehend time when they are excited about something.  Like last week when we did the activity in which they made landforms out of homemade dough, even though I told them numerous times we would do the activity after lunch, they asked me a millio...

I almost wrote this blog post last night and I am glad I did not because I had a very interesting day today. It was a day my students had been looking forward to all week.  At the beginning of the week, we sent home a letter asking parents to make homemade salt dough to send to school on Friday for use in science.  Today was the big day. At the end of the day, students were going to use the dough to create landforms on an island that they had colored.  The students were excited all day.  Even though I told the class several times that science would not be until 2pm, they asked all day long, “Is it dough time yet?!”  After lunch and recess, we had one more activity to get through before students were allowed to start working on their islands.  They had to use a text to answer one research question about Thanksgiving, using a graphic organizer.  I thought they would be motivated to finish in a timely fashion so that they could start science, but...

Just when I feel like I really have the hang of things at school, something happens that makes me rethink. In ELA this week, my students have been learning about alphabetical order, dictionaries, and glossaries.  My CT had one activity planned in which students looked up four words on www.dictionary.com to find pronunciation, part of speech, and a definition.  I asked her if I could copy pages out of a children’s dictionary instead, and she agreed to let me try the activity that way.  This was an eye-opening experience for me.  Most of the children seemed baffled by the dictionary.  I think that most of them had never used one before.  The two students who didn’t struggle terribly with the activity worked at a much slower pace than I had anticipated.  As I observed the class struggling to do the assignment, I wanted to kick myself.  I should have anticipated that they would have had trouble with this.  I stopped them all, and we lo...

First, thank God the edTPA is over. (The above picture is from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) Moving on, the thing I have been thinking about a lot this week is that what happens in the classroom with the students is a small percentage of what a teacher actually does.  I knew this going into student teaching, but it has been more prominent in my thinking this week.  I think it’s because the edTPA is over.  Not only did the edTPA take up a lot of time, it was always in the back of my mind.  It added another layer of stress to everything else.  Now that it is over, I do feel like my load is lightened, but there is still so much to do.  (I did ask my CT if I could have a heavier hand in planning now that I’m done with the edTPA, and she’s all for it.)  I have just been thinking about all the behind-the-scenes work.  I feel like no matter how much I work, there is always more to do.  I could be looking for a bett...

This week I think I have improved in my teaching of ELA, though I’m not where I want to be yet.  Looking at the week in ELA as a gradual release of responsibility to the students really helps.  We "front load" the explicit and intentional teaching on Monday and Tuesday, with the students doing more independent work as the week goes on.  In math and science the timing of the weeks is a little bit different.  We are not typically starting with something new on Monday with the expectation of the students working on it independently by Friday.  The students are still working toward mastery of the standard, but they do not necessarily follow a weekly trajectory like ELA. My CT paid me a compliment today.  She said I do a good job teaching math and science and that she wants me to gain that same confidence when I teach ELA.  I think part of the problems is that I have an affinity for teaching math and science because I enjoy the black-and-white nature o...

The last two weeks have been crazy.  Last week was a short four-day week with early dismissal on Friday.  Yesterday was early dismissal for the students, and then parent-teacher conferences until 9pm.  Today was a teacher institute at the district.  We have also had a complete overhaul of the way we do math.  The change in math has been very interesting.  Since the beginning of the year, five students from my class have been going to a math intervention program, which is taught by a special ed teacher.  The school has recently been given the opportunity to extend this program to more struggling students.  With more slots available for struggling students, an additional seven students from my class also qualify, bringing our total number of students in the math intervention to twelve of our twenty.  Because so many of our students qualify for this intervention, my CT and I will each teach a small group using the math intervention in our c...

This week has had some high highs and some low lows.  The good news is that I think I am doing a good job teaching math.  I have a routine down.  I know how to carve out extra time for struggling students during guided math.  I know how to use my own materials as well as the workbook.  I think I explain things well.  It is really gratifying to see students work through material and finally understand something that took some effort for them to understand.   In other good news, I think am doing fine in social studies and science.  We finished a six-week social studies unit, and have started a six-week science unit.  Without freaking out, I managed some last minute scheduling changes as well as a class period in which I expected to use my CT’s laptop to show some videos, but she was called down to a meeting (with her computer) so I had to use another approach.  The bad news is that I am struggling in language arts.  I am over...

Yesterday was the first day I actually got mad at my students.  During math, I teach guided math groups at a table while the rest of the students work independently at their desks.  I introduced subtraction with regrouping yesterday, and to do this I used base ten blocks.  When I did the whole group lesson, the students seemed engaged and seemed to be following.  I had one student volunteer hold the hundred blocks, one held the tens, and one held the ones.  Then I talked the students through how the ones had to borrow a ten-rod from the tens place.  They answered my questions and seemed to be following.  When we got to guided math at the back table, everything changed.  I take the lowest group first to ensure that they have plenty of time with personal attention and direct instruction from me.  They did not follow directions and messed around with the base ten blocks.  My aggravation peaked when one of the students laughed at another st...

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...

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 st...

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.  The...

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 ...

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 ...