Week 8

    So, the start of a new placement, and a goodbye to my first placement. What a week last week was, learning another set of student names, getting to another teacher, and re-learning procedures once again in the classroom. I was quite unsure of what this new placement would look like and whether it would be another good placement after having a good first placement. After this week I can say that I am really excited for the next nine weeks and what these nine weeks hold for my teaching and for my time in the classroom.
   I am placed in a third grade classroom at Memorial School in Tinley Park, Illinois. There are two other third grade classrooms in our school and our school is made up of K-5. Our classroom currently has 16 students. There is such a low number of students because there is a service dog in our room. His name is Logan and he works with one of our students who has spina bifida. This student is very independent and in the opinion of my teacher really does not need a service dog as she is able to move around on her own and really tries to a lot of things on her own. But we do have a service dog so any kids in the class at the beginning of the year who were allergic to dogs or scared of dogs were moved to other classrooms. I have really enjoyed getting to know my students this week, they've really been enjoyable getting to know. I've also really enjoyed getting to know my cooperating teacher. She has been teaching at Memorial for 13 years and is a very experienced teacher, but still a teacher who really is a great educator and tries her best to bring a great education to these kids. I have been very impressed with how the school is run and how effective the procedures that happen in the school are. The school is very well run overall and I have been impressed by how the school works overall. We also have an aide in our classroom in the morning and an aide in the afternoon, both whom are tasked with working with our student with spina bifida.
   Throughout this week I was able to learn about the students in our classroom and their backgrounds and where they come from. I also was given the opportunity to teach a bit of social studies and a bit of language arts when my teacher needed to step out of the room or talk to someone else so it was a bit of a small transition which was nice. I also really enjoyed getting to know my students, my teacher uses a lot of games in the classroom which I was able to take part in at times and I really enjoyed working in my relationships with the students and getting to know them better. One big change from this placement from that of my first placement is that the school dat is about an hour and fifteen minutes longer, so that was definitely something that I need to adjust to as the day is quite a bit longer than I got used to with the first seven weeks. Overall, I am very excited for this placement and I can't wait to get to know my students better and to improve overall in my teaching this semester.