Looking ahead

I think that it will feel strange on Monday that I will not be completely in charge of the class anymore. In a way, I think it will be good experience in terms of team teaching, though. My CM will be taking over the mornings with Shared Reading, we will both contribute to Guided Reading, and I will continue to teach math and writing. The last week of my student teaching I will be able to pick up some social studies lessons. I am excited to try out these lessons, as I have not really taught any social studies all year.

Week's reflection

It was an exhausting week. While my second week of full-time teaching was easier in terms of classroom management, it was still just as hard in terms of lesson planning and implementation. I learned that there are so many things to think about and juggle throughout the course of the day. I think that is what makes teaching so exhausting, constantly planning, evaluating and coordinating situations and lessons. I finally felt like my place as the teacher clicked into place this week. I was feeling upset on Monday because it still felt like I was struggling to hold my place as the teacher in the room. I was feeling frustrated. But, somehow on Tuesday things started go more smoothly. I think that it helped that I consciously tried to not put extra pressure on myself to try to make things be perfect. I think that, as a result, I was able to relax a little bit more and this transition in my outlook allowed me to be a better teacher.

Understanding your students

I have learned that good lesson planning is the best way to prevent behavior problems. Lessons where I can engage the students in a meaningful way are the ones where I have less acting out. In addition, though, I have realized how important it is to have good time management. I now know the students in my class that will immediately start acting out when they finish their class work. Having enough work or an appropriate amount of time to complete work is essential. I am still learning how to judge how much time to give students for certain tasks.

Time management

I am still struggling to estimate how much time certain activities will take. It never seems like there is enough time in the day or the week to get everything done (especially when you have to fit in testing and test prep!) I would rather have too much planned than run out of lessons for the day, but it causes me to constantly evaluate which lessons to cut or how to extend to give students more time. I do, in a way, like that part of teaching- the fluid and changing nature of the day. It keeps you on your toes to be continually assessing and making decisions about your next steps.

Testing

This week the students seemed to be getting burned out on taking tests. They had to take the Benchmarks this week. They took the Reading Benchmark on Tuesday afternoon. The class as a whole did not score very well. It was surprising and much different than their predictive test and previous benchmarks. The passages that they had to read seemed very long to me. In addition, I think that they were too tired at the very end of the day to really concentrate on it. I think that I will try to give the PSSA tests early in the morning to try to prevent this burnout from happening.

Games

On Friday afternoon I led a math vocabulary game. My CM has electronic buzzers similar to those on a game show that the kids could use during the game. She warned me that the kids go crazy for this game, so I knew that I would have to set expectations. I set my expectations before we started and had to remind them of it once while playing. There was a little bit of confusion, because the kids had very clear ideas about how they thought the rules of the game should go. I let them give me their suggestions, but ultimately made the final decisions and stuck with them. I knew that once we were finished playing the game, I would need to get them to calm down before packing up. I had everyone sit down in their seats and take a moment to quiet down and take a deep breath. I am pleased with the way that it went overall and I might try to use the game again.

Mini math unit

This week I taught a mini-unit on coordinate grids as a supplement to their regular math lessons. They need to know this concept for the PSSA's, but it will not be covered until afterward. My CM helped me a lot with finding resources on the topic. I used an old version of the Investigations curriculum that taught coordinate grids by looking at a neighborhood map on a grid system. I started the unit by introducing the concept through the PSSA Coach book. Then we used the Investigations curriculum to explore the ideas further. We ended with a computer game about ordered pairs. I really enjoyed having this continuity throughout the week and delving further into a particular topic. Previously I have just been teaching mini-lessons in math from the PSSA coach book, so it was a nice change of pace. It has made me excited to teach the upcoming math unit on graphing that I will start in 2 weeks.

Response to Literature

In Literacy, the students worked on writing a response to literature essay. It was suggested in the Trophies curriculum guide to use this type of writing with the story for this week. The story, In the Days of Kind Adobe, is a folktale and the students wrote about whether or not they thought it was a good example of a folktale. I found it very satisfying to work with the students on this assignment. We started by discussing the characteristics of a folktale with the whole class before we read the story. Then I had the students use post-it notes while we read about places that they saw these elements in the story. The next day I showed them an example of a response to literature essay for a fable that we had also read. After discussing it, the students started their pre-writing using a graphic organizer that I had made. I met individually with students as they went through this process to make sure they were on the right track. I really loved working with students in this individual way while they were writing. It was a way to assess their understanding and assist students that needed extra help.

Math test

Last week, I had the opportunity to help make the math test that the students took on Friday. I found a couple of questions from the PSSA coach book that I included to give them practice with constructed response. I also made up a couple of questions to match more closely matched the kind of work that we had done in class. Finally, I included a short assessment from their curriculum textbook. I graded the tests today and was very pleased with their results. All of the students except 2 received A's. It was very fulfilling to know that the students really understood the material.

Almost there

I can feel myself easing into a full-time role. It has taken awhile because of the missed snow days, but this week I have taken more control in the classroom. I realized that I just needed to start asserting myself and taking charge. It is a tricky balance because I don't want to step on my CM's toes. However, I feel that we have a relationship now where I feel comfortable stepping up and directing the class when needed. A couple of times this week she has been out of the room when I finished a lesson or when the students came back to the class after a special. Previously in the year I would not have been sure about role in figuring out how to direct the students during these down times. I now know the class routines where I felt comfortable picking up a new activity with them, such as going over homework or sharing their writing assignments with the class.

4th graders

One thing I love about this age group is that they are still young enough that they get excited about small things at school. There are very few times when I announce an assignment that I hear groans. Instead, I usually hear at least a couple of students say "yes!" I have been reading the students a Harriet Tubman biography during morning meeting. The students are very interested in it. One morning they were so wrapped up in the book, that they were continuing to ask questions and talk about it as I tried to transition into the firstlesson of the day. It is great to see them get so much out of the book.

Ongoing Assessment

I think that this was actually my first full week in the the classroom because of all of the snow days. It was great to have a steady run and feel a deeper connection to the class and routines. On Monday the students did the "Think and Respond" questions about the story in their textbooks that we had read the previous week. The story was a non-fiction piece about inventors. There were a couple of questions about the text structure of the piece, since it was broken up into sub-categories with headings. However, I noticed that the students were not understanding how to use the headings to help them go back to the text to locate information. My CM suggested that I pull a lesson from the PSSA prep book about text structure to help them with this concept. She also came up with a great lesson for the kids as well. Using their Storyworks (a kid's magazine that the students receive each week), she designed a lesson and worksheet to guide the students through understanding the purpose of headings and sections in
non-fiction pieces. The students were excited about reading the story after pre-reading and completing the worksheet. It was a great example of she assessed an area that they needed more work on and created a dynamic lesson as a result.

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Reading Buddies

The 4th grade at Penn Alexander participate in a great program called Reading Buddies. Every other week the students visit a local retirement home. They are paired up with a buddy who they read with during their visit. It is a fantastic program, one that the students and buddies look forward to each time. The students bring their latest reading assignment with them. After they have finished reading it together and working on a related activity, then the group has a snack before heading out. It is most fun to watch the group during snack time, as the students and buddies are usually chatting and learning about each other. This week the reading buddies prepared a presentation for the students about Black History Month. They shared songs, poems and personal stories with the class. The students then wrote about the experience once we got back to school. They all had very positive experiences and appreciated the time and effort that they put into the presentation.

TEP Open House-Saturday!

This Saturday GSE will be hosting an open house to learn more about the Teacher Education Program. The event will take place from 10:00-11:30am on Penn's campus (in the Terrace Room at Cohen Hall). It will be a great opportunity to get your questions answered from faculty, staff and current students. For more information, check out the GSE webpage: http://www.gse.upenn.edu/node/156. Hope to see you there!

Leading the day

Today I led most of the day. It felt great to try out this role. In the morning we started a new read aloud, a biography of Harriet Tubman. I focused on looking at the front and back cover of the book to make predictions about the story. I was pleased with how attentive the students were during the discussion. I find it interesting that they seem more engaged in the non-fiction read alouds than the fiction read alouds. I will need to think more about how I can engage them during the afternoon fiction read aloud. I then led an activity about their most recent shared reading passage, a fictional story about the March on Washington. We did a vocabulary worksheet, then created signs for the protest using vocabulary words. After lunch I led a math lesson on subtraction strategies. It was a big switch from being mostly an observer during the day to leading most of the classroom activities. I look forward to transitioning into this role soon.

Sticks and stones

There were a lot of social conflicts in the class this week. There was name calling, teasing, and pushing. Some of the incidents happened in front of me, while most happened on the playground or when my CM or I were working with other students. Last semester I was reluctant to get involved with social conflicts between students. However, I think that this semester I need to learn how to address some of these issues. I think that it is a fine line knowing when students are tattling or stretching the truth and when issues are serious enough to address. A student informed me that someone was pushing them and throwing stuff at them on the playground. I thought that I did need to address this type of situation. I pulled the student aside to talk to them about what had happened and how they could have handled the situation differently. I think that I do need to be aware that students might be also testing me to see how much I allow tattling, so I think I should be careful to only address issues where students need more guidance.

Independence

One of the great things about my CM's classroom management is teaching the students to be independent. I appreciate how she expects them to take care of themselves, their belongings, and the classroom as a whole. She also expects many housekeeping tasks to be done without students asking her or her telling them to do it. It reminds me of a parent/child relationship in terms of taking care of a household together. I also like that she will have frank conversations with the class when she thinks that they are not acting responsibly, etc. In a way she is teaching them life lessons and independence as well as academics.

Too much time/not enough time

Today I led another shared reading activity. It was a lesson focusing on character traits from the story that we had read yesterday. I walked the class through identifying a character trait for one of the characters and then finding examples from the text to support that trait. Then they had to do the same thing for a different character from the story. While they were working on their own, my CM suggested that I have them turn in their notes into a paragraph, since it is one of the things that they are tested on on the PSSA's. We had enough time, so I then led them through writing a paragraph about a character trait using their examples to support. It surprised me how quickly they finished with both of these tasks. It also made me realize the importance of having a back-up plan, especially since the art teacher was almost 10 min late coming to the class.

On a similar note, the math lesson that I led actually took much longer than expected. I taught the math lesson where the class constructed a 10,000 chart to display in the room. I had a feeling that this task would take a long time, but was not expecting it to go almost 2 hours! Luckily my CM was understanding and let us continue to work on it and finish it to completion. The students loved seeing the final chart hung up on the wall since it took them so long to finish making it. It was a great accomplishment.

Shared reading

Today I led a shared reading activity. They usually listen to a tape recorded version of the story from their textbook and my CM stops the tape to ask questions throughout. I followed this model and used the teacher's guide to help me with what type of questions to ask. Even though it went well, there are some improvements that I think I could make. One thing is to have a clearer focus for the students during the reading. We recently learned about BDA (before, during and after) activities for literacy lessons in one of our classes. I think that I should employ this technique next time. This improvement would help with another thing that the lesson was missing- a strong closing. Once the story was over, I did not know exactly how to end the lesson. I think that if I would have had a clear focus or "during activity", then it would have been easier to end with the "after activity".

Shadow puppetry

I attended a teacher workshop on Saturday at the art museum about shadow puppetry. It was led by a group called Chinese Theatre Workshop. It was a fascinating workshop and I am so glad that I took the time to participate in it. I used to work in theatre and am always thinking about ways to incorporate it into teaching. In addition, I have seen several performances that incorporated shadow puppetry and found it fascinating.

The workshop began with a small history lesson about shadow puppetry in China and other countries such as Turkey and Indonesia. It is an ancient art form that is traditionally performed behind a screen or sheet with beautiful 2-dimensional puppets made out of leather. The Chinese Theatre Workshop has adapted this practice to being performed on an overhead projector. Obviously this technique can be easily translated into classrooms with students. They lead workshops at schools and help children make their own puppets on transparency paper to perform short plays on overhead projectors in their class. They feel that it is an accessible way to introduce children to the process of putting on a play. After they demonstrated various ways to construct puppets and scenery, we then made puppets and presented them to the group. I hope that I can employ some of these ideas with my class, if not this year then in the future.

The great thing about attending this workshop at the art museum was that I also received a teacher's packet with curriculum guides, DVD and slides about Chinese art. In addition, I received free entrance to the museum after the workshop. Even though I have lived in Philadelphia for over 5 fives, I have never visited the art museum. I was glad to have the opportunity to visit it. It is a beautiful building with lots of exhibits. I particularly enjoyed seeing the Monet room. In addition, I really loved their Pennsylvania art exhibit which included lots of Shaker art. Overall, it was a nice day and I would consider going to another workshop at the museum in the future.

Social studies project

The students have been working on a social studies project over the past two weeks. They have been studying immigrants in the United States. For this project, the class was divided into small groups and each assigned a different racial group to study. They researched how the group originally came to the United States and their contributions to American culture. Today, the groups presented their final posters to the class. It was fun to see their process with this project. The students seemed to really enjoy being able to work on their own and be creative. They were even asking for more social studies time throughout the week to work on the projects. They all presented their material to the class and some great conversations transpired as a result of their projects.

Core curriculum

I have been noticing some ways that my CM adjusts the curriculum to meet the class' needs. A small example was during the spelling pre-test. The book gives example sentences to read to the students. She changed some of the sentences to make them more relevant to the students. For example, one word was "avenue" and the sentence was about driving down Oak Avenue. She changed it to Lancaster Ave, a street that most of the children are probably familiar with. It was a subtle way of adapting, but I thought a positive one. She also skipped over the next story in their reading textbook in order to use the story that dealt with compare and contrast ideas. They have been reviewing compare and contrast essays for the PSSA, so she was able to weave these lessons into it. These small adjustments are ways to make the core curriculum work better for the individual class.

Testing their boundaries

The students have started to test me this week. If my CM runs out of the room for a minute to make a copy, the students notice and I can tell that they start to get more excited. There was one student that would look at me to see if I was paying attention, then throw a ball across his desk or do something else distracting like that. I said his name as a warning the first time. He was obviously still trying to test me, though. The next time I told him that if I had to call his name one more time he would have to write it on the board (one of my CM's classroom management routines). This warning sent a hush over the whole class and we didn't have any more problems. I was glad that this happened so that the class came to understand that I have the same power in the room as their teacher. Later in the week, the students came back early from science class and my CM was not back in the room yet. They were immediately noisy and being rowdy. I instructed them to get out their math books and open to their next lesson. This settled them down a little bit, but for some reason one of the kids decided to yell, "The teacher is coming back! She's back!" when he saw her coming. My CM then had a talk with them about personal responsibility and trust, but also about how I am the same as her in the classroom (and they should treat me as such).

Logo Paths

I can't believe that this was only the second week of the new semester! The time is already flying by. I led two math sessions in the computer lab this week. My CM wanted me to teach the students how to use a computer program called LogoPaths. It includes extension activities that deal with shapes, perimeter and area. When initially thinking about how to teach them to use this program, I decided that I would model first how to use the commands, then have them practice on their own. While this method worked for some of the students, some of them were still unclear about how to do the activities. I think that if I would have led the whole class in doing the first problem together, it might have helped some of the students. I also made the mistake of showing one of the students how to change his cursor into different shapes. (It starts out as a turtle, but you can change it to be a variety of animals and objects.) I thought that it would help this particular student because he was having a hard time figuring out which was the front of the turtle, and therefore whether to turn left or right. Knowledge about these settings quickly spread through the class and it was very difficult to calm them down and focus back on the activity.

Nancy Drew

This week I am starting to become more involved in the class. Today I started reading the end of the day read-aloud. The class is currently reading a Nancy Drew book. They meet on the carpet after they have gathered their belongings and we read a chapter before the are dismissed. It is surprising to me how engaged the students are in this reading, considering they are only minutes away from being dismissed. The chapter ended at a very suspenseful moment. (Nancy and Ned were stuck in quicksand!) The students were so disappointed that we would be stopping there and not finding out what happened next. We had a couple more minutes before we had to line up, so I asked if they wanted me to read one more page. They all did, so I continued reading until the bell rang. It is nice to see the students so invested in this activity.

A new classroom

I am back at school and back at student teaching! This week was a big shift for me. Not only am I in a new classroom, but I am experiencing being in a self-contained class for the first time. I switched placements from being in the science room at Penn Alexander to a 4th grade class at the same school. It was great staying in the same school because the students in my new class already were familiar with me, as I am familiar with them. However, I was surprised that it felt like starting over with them. In science I acted more as an assistant teacher, walking around the room during their group work and helping the students with their work. By the end of the semester the students were coming to me with their questions and I felt like they saw me as a teacher in the room. Therefore, I was surprised that this week some of the same students were not asking me any questions and barely acknowledging me. I guess this is a natural transition into a different atmosphere. They are not used to me in this setting and need to figure out my place (as I do too!)

I spent most of the week just observing the class. It felt very different, but I was glad to have the opportunity as there are a lot of new routines and curriculum that I need to absorb. However, I am already itching to become more involved. During the math lessons I felt most comfortable to fall into my old routine of walking around the room helping students with their investigations. My CM and I made a plan for me to teach at least one math lesson next week. She also assigned me to a guided reading group by the end of this week. It was actually intimidating at first because I had not seen guided reading in practice yet. I think that my previous relationship with the students allowed me to jump into it and feel more comfortable, though.