My First Full Day!

Today was my first day teaching the entire day by myself. And oh boy, was it exhausting.

We started the day with our standard entry, calendar, flag, weather and community meeting. Then we started introducing literacy centers today. We are not doing the literacy centers in the traditional way that is commonly described in many literacy handbooks. The literacy centers are leveled for our students, so today we introduced three different literacy centers, but only to the groups that were interacting with those literacy centers specifically. I was a little bit hesitant to do the centers in this way but it ended up being incredibly successful. The groups were quiet, and on task, both of which are rare for my classroom. The students seemed to like it because they were a nice change from doing SSR every day. The students were also excited see that they would be doing a different literacy center every day of the week, which was especially motivating for the students.

Then we moved onto our leveled literacy groups, of which I teach a standards group. The kids were a little bit crazy since we haven't done guided reading groups for so long, but they were excited to have a new teacher and a change of scenery. For guided reading groups I teach 28 grade level standards students in another teacher's classroom, bringing 6 of my students with me. The entire second grade participates so the students love to see new people teaching them and have a change of classmates twice a week.

After recess we had writing, where we started expository writing. This lesson went a little bit rough. The introduction to expository writing is that the students were to work with a partner, have one partner draw a snowman and then give their partner directions to allow them to draw an identical snowman to show the importance of giving very specific directions. Evidently I could have used some lessons of my own on giving specific directions because the students were slightly confused about what the purpose was and how to really give specific directions. Eventually the students began to understand how to give clear, specific directions to draw the snowman, which will be helpful since our writing prompt is "How to Build a Snowman".

After lunch we continued our reading of folktales. We finished Bearhead by Eric Kimmel and started Pecos Bill by Steven Kellogg. The students really enjoy the folktales and laugh constantly when they see the illustrations. It is really a good way to get kids into good literature or just reading in general when so many are so excited to hear the stories.

Math brought a continuation of math centers we started on Friday that the kids really enjoy. For some reason my students cheer and clap every time I tell them we are doing stations. I think they would anything if it was put in station format (a great teaching hint for me!).

We ended the day with words work, or spelling practice. Since it was my first day teaching I wanted to try out a new game to see how the students liked the spelling practice where everyone gets to participate, the students get to move around and they get to chant! The activity I chose was called "Spelling Bee" and the students absolutely adored it! Spelling Bee is played like this: one student is chosen to be the "spelling bee". That student walks around the classroom and as they do, the rest of the classroom chants, "Spelling bee, spelling bee; Buzzing on your spelling spree; Ha, ha, hee, hee; You can't sting ME!" When the word "me" is uttered, the spelling bee stands behind a student. The teacher then chooses a spelling word for the seated student to spell. If the word is spelled correctly, the seated person becomes the new spelling bee and the old bee sits in that chair. If the word is spelled incorrectly, the students find the word on the word wall and the whole class spells the word in unison and the spelling bee remains the bee. I have never seen kids get so excited to spell before I played this game so it is definately one I will use again and will use in my future classrooms to practice spelling.

We ended the day in somewhat of a rush since so many students chose steps for talking when they were given instructions not to. However, I made it through the day in one piece. And had my first taste of full time teaching!

I am anxious to continue with the full days of student teaching to get my feet wet with more science, social studies and writing since those are the areas I feel that I need more practice on. Either way though, I can now say I have taught a full day, and that is SO exciting!