Week 11

    Week 11 has came and went, but another solid week of teaching has also came and went. Monday I was not at school as I was at my grandma's funeral in Wisconsin so I was at school for four days this week instead of five. This week I taught all of the morning subjects, which includes Daily Language, Social Studies, Science, and Literacy Studio. I would say that I felt pretty well prepared for each day of my teaching as most of these subjects have been mostly straight forward to teach. We have a curriculum that we follow for Science, Social Studies, Daily Language so for these subjects I basically follow our curriculum which makes preparation for these classes straightforward. Literacy Studio is kind of a cool idea in my opinion. Basically it is an hour and a half of students independently working on reading and writing goals. Students make reading goals with the teacher about once a month which is recorded in a binder by both the teacher and the student. Then, during Literacy Studio, students work on these reading goals, do independent reading, and work on other writing and reading activities such as blogging on the class blog or writing stories. I really like this activity because it gives the students a lot of choice in their work activities and also encourages them to get large amounts of reading in, which really helps with their love of reading and their concentration on these reading goals. The students really focus well on these goals and usually get a lot of reading and goal work done in this time, which would be surprising for some third graders, but these students really can focus and work well on these goals. Students also receive incentives for finishing their reading goals, such as class cash, and pizza certificates to Pizza Hut for each goal they finish.
   On Wednesday I was able to teach completely independently in the class again, my teacher was called over to the fifth grade classroom to sub for an hour and a half so I was able to teach without my teacher in the room which as Dr. Snoeyink said last week is really a great opportunity whenever it happens and I think something that is constructive to my teaching. This week I have continued to work on my behavior management with the students. I think that it is going well, but a large part of that is also because of the routines and procedures that have been laid out by my teacher. I have been attempting to keep track of these procedures and routines in order to use them in my future classroom as well.
   Thursday was an interesting day at school as well, the choir was going around to all the schools in the district putting on a concert so all but one of the girls in our class were absent all day, meaning that we only had 8 students! At the end of the day we were able to go to our choir's concert which was really great. I was so impressed by them and really felt so proud of my student's work in choir and their great talent. Friday Mrs. Hysell was able to come and observe my social studies lesson which I think went well and I enjoyed meeting with her. My hope is that you will now be able to understand a little more about my class now that you have met them and seen them in action Mrs. Hysell. This week really helped me in my confidence to begin full-time teaching which begins next week (this week is Spring Break). Full-time teaching will of course lead to a large amount of preparation each day, but I think that it will be very rewarding once I get into the swing of teaching. This week has also been filled with job applications as so many job opportunities have been coming up as of late. Job applications really get tedious after awhile but it feels good to at least get my name and information out into the job world.