Reflection 11/25

This week was really short, but very eventful. I was supposed to use the laptops on Monday, and the wireless Internet was NOT working! I had to change all of my plans right there on the spot, and it was very stressful. It all worked out in the end, but I was extremely nervous going into it, because I was not well planned anymore. I did end up having the kids finish up their cartoons and work on horror so it was a good work day in the end. I am happy that I was able to adapt a lesson out of what happened, and I am scheduled to be in the lab on Tuesday so I will have a backup plan ready since I am not sure if they will work then.



One really good thing about this week, was seeing the kids excited about book selection for their fantasy book groups. Coraline, The BFG, and The Doll People sparked a lot of excitement and I love seeing kids ready to read. I felt like the meanest person ever when I told them they were not starting on Tuesday and they had to wait until Monday for their books. I hope they are still excited then!

Reflection 11/21

This week was another good week. One strength for the week was transitioning from math to Language Arts. I feel like my first few days went really well and I am enjoying getting the chance to teach two classes and seeing the differences. I am noticing the differences between the two classes and they are pretty different. One class is more chatty and needs more support. The other class is good at working individually and needs to be prompted for answers more. They aren't as chatty of a group. Something I came across this week was having to discipline. I got very angry at my afternoon class on Friday and told them that the next person who is acting out needs to call their parents right then. Right after I said that the class settled down and this one kid decided to test my "threat". He came walking up with his shirt over his face and making funny hand motions. I sent him straight to the phone. This stopped the class and settled them down for the most part.

Two students had been fighting before making it to my class and the fight continued into class time. I was not aware of the previous situation, but it was apparent something was off. I went around the room and noticed the kid drawing a rather threatening picture and had labeled it as the kid who he was having the fight with. I had to call down to the office and send the kid with his picture to the office. I was nervous about doing this but I had no other choice that I could see. My CT was not in the room at the moment, so I did not get to ask for an opinion and I had to make my own choice. I think I chose wisely because the picture was something that needed to be dealt with by higher authority. I am glad that I am getting the opportunity to test these things out and I wish they weren't necessary, but I would be naive to think I would never need to discipline.

This week is going to be really short and I am looking forward to a break! With these 2 days I need to be able to get a lot done with a lot of interruptions. I am nervous about it, but I am hoping that it goes well. I need to use my time to the fullest. I am hoping for full cooperation from the students so we can have fun and get what needs to get done.

Designing Lessons for Diverse Learners

After our seminar I took a close look at the article, Designing Lessons for Diverse Learners by Natalie Olinghouse. As a whole I find it to be a great guide for the way I accommodate my students. Certain things that I am seeing in here, we do and I never even realized it was considered an accommodation. Just today I gave a word study test. I read the paragraph VERY VERY slowly and repeated each word a lot of times. Then I would reread the whole sentence and stress the words they needed to fill in. I then read the whole thing again through at the end so they could follow along and check their work. I asked my CT after if I was going too slow, and she said it was perfect because some of the kids need to hear it a couple of times. Some kids may not, but I was accommodating those who need it through a whole group setting. I hope that some of the kids who would think I am going way too slow caught mistakes and read over their papers. This would fall into the steps she sets for making accommodations. Since this is something that can benefit all students I think it is a great step to take.

Another connection I had to this article is under step 6 where she talks about altering existing materials. When I did my math unit, I did not take a lot of information out of the actual curriculum. I scaffolded my lessons based on it, but I added in almost all of my own worksheets and projects. I felt the need to do this, because I felt that the student sheets that they provided would have not worked with the class I had. I wanted to take things even more step by step and make sure that they understood powers of ten, basic facts, and place value before expecting them to do all of the clustering. The students did begin to grasp the bigger picture with the aid of these additions into the curriculum.

For my own planning purposes, I feel the chart she provides is wonderful. I have a lot of questions about specific students and for many of them I can find possible solutions right in the article. Next time I lesson plan, I am going to take a look and hopefully implement something new into my teaching.

Reflection 11/14

This week went really well. I was extremely excited to get signed off for subbing, but I was even more excited to get my first job. It was in the room that is not normally my home base and it was really different, but I definitely feel good about how it went. Something I really noticed this week was how long lessons take in math. I feel like I had so many more things planned, but never got to them because of how long things took with understanding and practicing skills we needed to go over. For example, I had to backtrack after teaching the chart method for clusters, because I realized they were not understanding the meaning behind place value, which I had just assumed they knew. I had to change up my schedule for the following day to add in a quick activity that included this so they would be able to fill out the charts. I was pleased to see that this lesson helped them fill in the chart worksheet.

This week I am going to work on my transition from math to language arts. I know it will be a good one, even though I have grown pretty attached to math in a sense. Its been a totally new experience and I have really enjoyed all the learning I have done from it. I will be working on making my lesson plans as fun and valuable as they can be.

Conferences

Conferences were a really good experience. Something that surprised me was how easy it came to make up the goals for each student. I learned how much I have learned about each and every one of them since the beginning of school. We struggled with only a few students, but for the most part we could come up with something perfect for each one. The students are pretty serious with these goals also. Some of them have already started to work on them, I hope they keep it up. Another thing that surprised me was seeing the kids in this situation. Some seemed nervous, and some seemed perfectly comfortable. I was also surprised to see how hard some of the kids were on themselves. For example one girl said she needed to work on reading, even though she is the highest reader in the class.

My CT was great at making the negative sound not so bad. Her wording for things was brilliant and I think they came out sounding great even if they were something pretty bad. I learned a lot about how to word things especially for parents that need to hear positives because you can tell all they have heard has been the negative. I also know there is a fine line, and I would not want a student or parent to feel offended by something I said.

I learned so much about my students and their families through conferences. I loved meeting the families and seeing the resemblance and hearing what the parents had to say about there own kids. I also liked hearing concerns of the parents and things that the student had on their minds that they never told us, such as people bullying them, or seating preferences. A lot of the things the parents were concerned about were things we also noticed, so it made things go really smoothly. The parents seemed to like the goal setting and I feel like it is something I would like to do in the future even if my school doesn't do it. I think student lead conferences are a great thing after being a part of them.

Reflection 11/8

This week was a great week. I started off the week with my GLT in math. Monday and Tuesday were both trying days and I just did not feel as comfortable as I have in the past. When I thought about it I realized that it was probably because I have never taught a whole lesson in Math class and that it was not my home base room so I felt sort of disconnected. To fix this I brainstormed some ways to make myself feel part of the class and the room, and I decided to try a community meeting. Since the class I had for math just had a community meeting in L.A we wished each other a "happy learning day" instead of a good morning. We also played a game that led into my lesson. I felt more connected with the class, and with teaching math. It gave me a great intro too and I feel like it was better than just jumping into math, especially after they just had language arts. I had a blast the entire class period and the kids played a great role in discussion and problem solving. Their ideas and ways to solve multiplication problems floored me. I really realized how smart they are! I continued on Thursday with community meeting and it was GREAT! We played telephone with the statement "Today we are going to draw our math". I then gave them a cross curricular project that had them doing math, writing, and drawing. The creativity was amazing and I am so amazed by how great every one of the drawings are. I could also tell who was getting clusters and who wasn't.

Next week I am going to work more on discussion and writing in math. Some of my students are really good at math, but hate to write so I am hoping that maybe writing about math will be something they could accomplish to better their writing skills and get them to write more. We are also going to be doing some group work that I think is going to be fun and really set these lessons in. I will be working on getting them to do a little more paper work than they did this week, and I think this will help all of them begin to reach mastery of the topics. It will also get them to settle down and do some individual work. This will also help me assess where they are more than just by volunteering and student response because I will be able to assess all the students.

Reflection 11/1

This week was another week that I am glad is over with. I was really sick and had to miss Monday. For pretty much the rest of the week I was still sick, extremely tired, and out of it and felt like I was not working to my normal strength. I do not like feeling like I was not giving my best all week, even though I know I was trying to. I am hoping that this is the last week for a long time that this happens. Two weeks in a row of sickness is not fun by any means. I am ready to get back to normal.

My strength this week would really have to be sticking it out even though I was feeling like I was. I know that I couldn't do it on Monday, but I went back Tuesday still pretty sick but well enough to be there. I did things to be as helpful and useful as I could be, even though that really did not include teaching since I had no voice. By the end of the week I was definitely feeling back in it and had a fun Friday. The kids were very energetic because of Halloween and our painting project allowed them to calm down and just have fun and be creative. When they were done they were coming to our room, where I was in the room having them do a small writing piece and then coloring. It was great to see them so excited but still managing to cooperate with the rules. They seemed to have a lot of fun in L.A and that made me happy since a lot of the kids are not that fond of the class.

I feel like I made a good accomplishment with our homebase class also. We had taken away YouTube from them, but since it was Halloween we watched some but with very strict rules. They all sat in there seats and watched. If someone was doing something they were not supposed to do I would pause until that person stopped. I feel this was showing them the expectations and teaching them how it should look when we watch movies or YouTube in homebase. Taking two steps backwards and teaching this really helped in this case.

Next week I start guided lead in math. I am very excited to get started and hope that my lessons are effective and help them learn the things I would like them to learn. I like lead teaching a lot and am excited for a chance to work on improving and getting more practice. I am slightly nervous about teaching math, but I am working my hardest and I hope that it will show when I get up there.