Classroom Pictures

Here are some pictures from my classroom so far this year! More to come as the year goes on!

This is a picture of our carpet area. There is the teacher's chair, a hundreds chart, our calendar for the month, and a sign asking some questions that we use during our morning and afternoon community meetings.

This is a picture of the daily schedule that is changed every day for students. Also you can see the objectives that we write daily for students so they know why they are doing certain activities. We are now trying to develop these objectives during class with the students so that they can take more ownership in the lessons and content.

A white board that is changed weekly and reflects the vocabulary focus for the week.

This is the area where students start their mornings. The colored popsicle sticks each have a child's name on it and they choose hot lunch, sandwich, milk only, and lunch from home so that we can do lunch counts and take attendance. Later in the morning a student (who changes each week) reads what is for lunch, tells what the date is and what the weather is like.

This is an example of a student desk cluster. In the middle there are community supplies and each student has their own name tag to show where their desk is. The students don't have desk cubbies so they have the blue chair pockets to hold what would be the content of a desk.

Biggest Surprise!

"Now that you are nearing the end of your first quarter of your internship, what has been your biggest surprise about being in the classroom and working with students?"

My biggest surprise in working with students is definately how important a consistent routine is to students. In my classroom we have a very predictable school schedule from day to day, with assembly or half days being an exception. This schedule has been the same since the beginning of the school year so the students are accustomed to this routine in our classroom. On Halloween my students had a different schedule than normal. Instead of having math and extras in the afternoon we had a Fall Harvest celebration where the students did some fall activities and got to watch The Incredibles for the remainder of the school day. All day the students were already wired because it was Halloween and they couldn't wait for the evening so they could go and trick-or-treat, so that extra energy is completely understanding. However, during the day where the routine was the same as any other Friday the students were able to put that energy toward their work. Once we got to the time of day where we were doing the Fall Harvest celebration the students didn't really know what to do with themselves. During the entire movie students were constantly coming up to my CT and I asking permission to do tasks which are trivial, wanting to know what they should be doing, and so forth. It seemed like the students weren't used to so much freedom of choice in our classroom, and truthfully it is fairly structured, but I would have expected the students to be excited for so much free time and a time period where they could just relax and not have to do anything really academic.

My biggest surprise working in the schools in general is how much the children really impact my daily life. Going into student teacher I knew that I would obviously get to know the students since I would be spending so much time with them over the course of the school year. I just never realized how much I would really care about the students and their happiness and well-being. Everyday I go home and think about my students in some way, whether that be correcting their homework or just of something eventful that had happened over the school day. When I have a student that is having problems at home, or just having a rough day overall, their unhappiness and issue really resonates with me and is something that I almost can't stop thinking about over the course of the day. One example is earlier in the year one of my student's brother passed away suddenly and the child is still struggling with acceptance and her emotions on a daily basis. When I found that out, I was sad for my student, of course, but I was more upset seeing her going through her mourning process and knowing there is not a whole lot that I can do to make her happy or feel better besides make sure she knows I am a resource for her to turn to. And although this connection that I feel between my students and I validates why I went into teaching in the first place since I am getting to make a positive impact in my student's lives and help them discover that learning can be fun. However, even in the brief time that we have spent in the classroom so far, I have learned a lot about teaching and children from the best resource that is available - from the children themselves.

Kids Say (and Write) the Darndest Things!

Today started with some learning lessons on how to create objectives with the whole class rather than just writing what we believe the objectives are and assuming that the class actually understands why these activities are being done. We have had several occasions lately where our principal has come into our class and asked our students why they are doing a certain activity and almost invariably the students are unable to say why the activity is important or is being done! Talk about frustration since we go over the objectives for each activity daily! But my CT has started to develop the learning and content objectives with the students daily so that they can take ownership of those activities and potentially understand more of why we are spending our time on certain activities.

We also continued progress monitoring with DIBELS testing. There were a couple students who made only slight progress but one student completely surprised me and just read his little heart out and now, is meeting standard! I was shocked but so thrilled for him!

The insight for today... Kids say and write hilarious things! As a teacher you have to learn when you can laugh and when you have to keep that to yourself as to not discourage the student from expressing their ideas aloud. But nonetheless, what they say and write is pretty funny sometimes.

In writing, in the spirit of Thanksgiving approaching and conferences messing with our normal routine, we decided to have the students write a "How To" paper about "How to Cook a Turkey". Most of the kids have no concept of how long to cook a turkey or an approriate temperature to cook it. For example, some students want the turkey cooked at 30 degrees for 9 minutes. Yikes! Or microwave for 10 minutes at 100 degrees. Interesting. The funniest one was a girl who wanted to cook a turkey that she called, "Turkey Extravaganza!". What were the ingredients, you may be asking yourself? Well a turkey, of course, and 12, that's right 12, lemons! I can't even imagine what that must taste like! :)

The other funny moment of the day was in my guided reading group. We read a story together about how kids can make money by starting their own businesses and gave examples of how some kids started businesses, the supplies they needed, how they advertised, and more. So, I decided that I wanted my group to decide in partners a business they could start and outline their business plan. Most decided to make lemonade, wash cars, or some other common job many of the students have done before. But one group decided to go above and beyond. The one partner was going to own a restaurant, the other (who just found out that she was going to be getting some bunnies) decided that in front of the restaurant she was going to have a stand where people could pet the bunnies, blow bubbles, and buy bunny poop because, the student said, "It's not very stinky and you don't have to do anything special to treat it. It's just naturally a great fertilizer!"

Wow, the things that seven-year-old students will say!

A Week of Learning!

Well this has been a very interesting week in my classroom for sure! It was filled with a lot of learning lessons and has been rather eventful.

This week was the second week that we were in our classrooms full time, to give us an opportunity to learn more about daily life in a classroom and for those who haven't been able to see a full day at the schools, it allows for that time as well. I spent Monday through Friday in the classroom full day which was exciting! I got to see the routine of each day and see how the children adjust to as weather and mood changes in the classroom. So on the the learning opportunities...

First of all, my CT had left me in charge of the classroom to take care of some business in the office while the students were doing their morning entry work. I had looked up to check on students and it seemed like as soon as I looked down to continue correcting papers, I had 3 students hurry up to me saying, "Miss D! Miss D! She just puked all over herself! And a book!" I looked up an one of my students had vomited all over herself, her desk, a book, the floor near my desk, and the trash can near the door. I quickly went over to her and made sure that she was okay and helped her get some paper towels to clean herself off. Then I was faced with a dilemna: my CT was out of the room, the students realized something was going on, and I had no clue what I should do! Luckily the teacher next door to mine didn't have any students at the time, so I ran next door and said, "What do you do if a student vomits in class!?" Thankfully, he knew exactly what to do and helped me greatly by cleaning up most of the mess so that we could do the community meeting to distract the students. My CT walked in right as we were coming back in to clean the mess and so she calmly called the janitor and the problem was taken care of. Lesson learned: I know I need to stay calm even in emergency situations (though this wasn't a major emergency at all) because the students are looking to me for guidance and direction on how to react in a situation. If I freak out, so will they. If I stay calm, they will follow suit.

The second major learning lesson happened the following day when we started the district writing assessment for the students. We had just finished narrative writing and so we thought that the students would be fairly comfortable writing in a narrative format on the assessment. Well, not 10 minutes into the assessment session and we have a student laying down on his desk bawling. After he spent his whole time not being productive because he was either frustrated or crying, or some combination of the above, it was time to do points. He was offered a six out of ten because he didn't even try for most of the working time. Well that set him off once again. Even though it was pizza day (a favorite for my students) there was no getting him to line up with the rest of the students, he was sitting at his desk, crying, with his head and arms tucked into his shirt. My CT saw what was going on, and left, knowing that I would have to learn how to deal with this situation. I excused the students to lunch and then dealt with the boy. I had to work for about 15 minutes to calm him down, assure him that he was doing a great job and that he could be successful with his writing even though spelling is a big issue for him. Then we came to the issue where he felt like he was being singled out by constantly being offered a six when points came around. We had to discuss why he was being offered a six, developed a plan to make his day that day and how he could use that plan to extend his good choices for the following days. Finally, when he was calm and collected we went and got him some lunch and he headed off to eat with a big smile! It was one of the first experiences where I felt like I had really made a difference and that I really connected with a student in my classroom. Learning lesson: My CT put it best when she said, "When you have a behavior issue in the classroom, you need to make sure their three basic needs are being met: Sleep, Food, and Love."

This past week had taught me a lot of lessons about being a teacher that I probably couldn't have learned other than by experiencing them myself, firsthand. I am glad that these situations arose when I am a student teacher rather than when I am teaching on my own and have to be so flustered with no one to turn to for extra help during that moment or to debrief with about what happened after the problem is solved. Overall, though it was exhausting to have two full weeks in the classroom (and on that side note, I realized that I am going to be constantly exhausted once I'm a full time classroom teacher) I believe that it was very successful and it a very positive experience filled in valuable learning lessons.

Teaching and Reteaching

It has been a while since my last post! Wow does student teaching take a lot of time, but boy is it worth the time and effort! My class now has 28 students and we are all growing and learning more as each day passes. I love watching the growth and to see students respond to both challenges and successes that their academic and personal lives bring them - they really are 28 very unique individuals! :)

This post will focus on me reflecting on a lesson I have taught recently with an eye toward reteaching or extending the lesson to support learners more thoroughly.

The lesson that I am going to reflect on is a writing lesson I taught today about creating paragraph planner for a piece of narrative writing. The students were writing about the prompt "A Trip to Remember" which was entertaining for students to get to share their unique trips and vacations with their classmates. The learning goals for the lesson were for students to understand how to use the paragraph planning sheet and understand how to transfer their ideas from the planning sheet into an actual paragraph written out. Additionally, students were expected to learn about transition and time order words to help link their ideas together and for the narrative paragraph to have more fluency. In order to learn these ideas, I told the students my own narrative story and had them help me decide how to fill out the paragraph planning sheet. Additionally, we brainstormed a list of transition and time order words together for all of the students to use as a resource.

Students responded well to this lesson because we had worked many times before with creating a "main idea" or opening sentence in a paragraph as well as a closing sentence for the paragraph. I knew that students understood what should go in each place on the planning sheet because they could all justify their answers as to how their response worked in each location.

If I were to reteach the lesson again, I would make sure to have a print off sheet to pass out to students with time order and transition words so that students can have a wide variety of words to choose from to best suit their individual situations. Additionally, the list of words would allow students to gain a better idea of what transition and time order words are so that they can recognize those words in their reading to add meaning in that respect as well. Moreover, if I were to teach the lesson again I would like to do some more thinking and brainstorming on how to get students to not focus so much on the spelling of their words but on the meanings in their ideas. So many of my students get so bogged down by spelling, no matter how many times I assure them that spelling is not a concern for a starting draft, and then get increasingly frustrated when they are not given the correct spelling of a word when asked. I am not sure how I can stress or model that spelling can be fixed during the editing and conference stages of the writing process. Do I misspell a word to try and model these common mistakes? But do I want to run the risk that students don't recognize the word being misspelled and learn the incorrect spelling? Would more free writing exposure help cure this idea? So many questions, that probably can only be answered with time and experience that I will hopefully be able to conquer more as the year goes on.

To reteach this lesson for students that have already successfully met my expectations always seems to provide more of a challenge. For the prompt "A Trip to Remember" students who have already met expectations could extend the writing to two paragraphs, or more if applicable, in order to challenge themselves. The students could also be challenged to add certain vocabulary words or words that have challenging spelling patterns into their stories so that they are still being intellectually challenged throughout the activity while other students are finishing.

Though these may not always work, it is always important to try new ideas or techniques to figure out what really works for a group of kids, since all kids to not behave the same way or respond to the same set of directions. Furthermore, this differentiated instruction allows students to succeed and be challenged at a level that is intellectually appropriate for the student while still keeping the students motivated to learn more rather than using more materials to "fill time?"

Hopefully I will be able to brainstorm more ideas for what to do to not only support struggling learners as well as challenge students who have already completed the activity to the standard that was set. This seems to be a constant struggle in general education classes but I want to make sure that the students who are already meeting or exceeding standards in my classroom do not feel left out or constantly bored with the activity, creating a negative association with a subject and the negative feeling I have now.

Changing my teaching ideas

Interns: You've been in your internship classroom since late August, assisting your Classroom Teacher in launching the school year. For your first blog post describe, briefly, one strong conviction about teaching that you brought to the classroom that has changed considerably during this time. What changed, and why is this a sign of personal growth?

One of the major things I have learned this year is that each class is so different from one year to the next, or even one day to the next in some cases. I thought that teaching second grade was teaching second grade. Of course there would be those memorable moments in each classroom that distinguished one from the next, but more or less the content and the lessons would be the same except for slight adjustments based on previous experiences. However, the more time I spend in the classroom I understand more and more how different each class can be from year to year. Based on the copies of last year's plans my CT has showed me several activities that were done last year during the same time of year, that the current group of second graders are simply not ready for - both developmentally and academically. This surprised me because I wouldn't have thought that a group of children would have changed that much over just one year.

Additionally, it surprised me to see how many things change simply because the teacher is interested in trying something new that he or she learned about over the summer or was dying to try out during the previous year but didn't have the time or resources to do so. I know in my classroom I have heard of major changes that have occurred between this year and last year. Some examples are including and developing a social studies curriculum for the year, basing instruction more on SIOP methodologies to increase accessibility of content to all students, and including the content and language objectives for the work day so that students can understand what we are doing over the course of the school day and why the skills are important. And that is just the beginning!

This realization has helped me grow as an educator and future classroom teacher because I understand that there is no one blanket format that fits all students, all the time. Coming into this experience I knew that there would be differences from year to year, but I never expected for the classroom teacher to initiate so many of those changes in addition to adapting lessons and units based on changes in student learning levels, making lessons so different from one class to the next. This has help me understand that as my learning progresses through my years as a classroom teacher, so will my instructional methodologies as well as what I am able to teach for the year. It seems that summers will be a time to catch up on those ideas that I had but didn't have time to put into action over the course of the school year and develop new ideas based on additional courses that I will take to keep my teaching certificate valid.

These realizations will help me be better prepared to adapt my lessons and instructional methods as the year progresses and I learn more about my future students. I can't wait to apply these lessons to my own future classroom to test my ability to change and adapt based on the needs of my students.

Welcome to My Internship Blog!

Welcome to my internship blog!

I am excited to start blogging about all of my internship experiences throughout my year of student teaching. I look forward to sharing my struggles and successes during the next year with you!

Lindsey