Allocation meeting

Maggie and I were invited to attend an allocation meeting for the teachers at Grants Lick Elementary. The meeting was held by the principal who has been attending all of the board meetings. She was relaying the message to her teachers. I thought it was very interesting because our principal does not sugar coat things. She told the teachers how it was thus far, what to expect, and when. The assistant principal will be the only one without a job at Grants Lick. She has been offered a position at one of the other schools. We also found out the approximate number of new students that will be attending Grants Lick due to the re-districting of the Campbell County school system. So far our school has been very lucky because we get to keep all of our teachers and will possibly be adding one more. The other schools have not been so lucky. Again nothing is finalized at this point and the information posted today may be wrong by tomorrow.

Social Studies Lessons

I finally got to teach my social studies lessons and I think it went pretty well! The first lesson I taught was on the Amazon Rain forest and I read a book that is perfect for teaching about the rain forest. It is called "The Great Kapok Tree" by Lynne Cherry. I recommend this book for anyone talking about the interdependence of animals and other people in the rain forest. I was a little nervous about how the students would react to being taught since they are used to the Montessori way of learning on their own. I made sure to engage the students through questions, activities, and worthwhile assignments. I had them each write a letter to someone telling them why it is important to save the rain forest and some of the letters they wrote were really great! I was really impressed with how much thought they put into their letters. It was also neat to see who they wrote their letters to because I told them they could write to who ever they wanted to. Several of them chose to write to the governor and one student even wrote her letter to the president. Overall, this first unit went really well and I can see what I did good and what I need to improve on. I am looking forward to teaching my next lesson.

Disappointed

So we have been this far into the semester and even though we have had a lot of snow days we have been at our practicum sites quite a few times and we have yet to see social studies being taught. The school seems to allow for a 30 minute time span to teach what they call a special. Every time we are there she either teaches science or goes over her time with math. Not that a subject should have a specific amount of time allotted for it but we don't see any social studies. I have been quite disappointed when it comes to watching her teach a "special" because even the science lessons that are being observed are not that engaging and would if I am bored I know the students have to be bored. There has not been really any group work or experiments going on and that is sad because everything else we have seen her teach has been actively engaging the students and really keeping the interested in the topic. I am starting to wonder if they will only be getting social studies instruction when my partner and I teach :(

Over the past few weeks Maggie and I have been teaching our class about George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Today my teacher asked me to go through the homework folders and see if parents left any notes from the weekend. On Friday their homework was to go home and tell their parents what they learned so far about the presidents. The mother of one of our students wrote a note that read something like this...I am very proud of XXX and was very pleased at the amount of information she has learned about the presidents. She talked all day about them. When I read this I was very excited. Maggie and I did very well.

Venn Diagrams

Last Wednesday I taught a lesson to my kindergarten class using a Venn Diagram. I introduced the class to the Venn Diagram and asked them to look around the room to see if they could find others. One student shouted out that he found one. It was a poster of word families and each family was seperated using Venn Diagrams. The lesson went really well and my teacher said she learned something from me. For my Venn Diagram I wrote George Washington on one side using a red marker and inside I wrote the word different using the same color. On the other side I wrote Abe Lincoln using a green marker and in his side I wrote the word different in green. In the middle where the two connected using both markers I alternated colors and wrote the word "same". The class had to tell me something they learned about one of the presidents and tell me if it went in the different circle or the same circle. My teacher said that after 30 years of teaching she has never thought to use different colors. Needless to say I was very proud.

Teach Time!

So John and I also got to finally teach our lesson on Wed. It went great, but I thought it could have gone a little better. I found out she did the exact same lesson with them the day before, so she could refresh their memory. We did maps and we talked about symbols and legends. I had them draw a map of their bedroom using a legend with symbols. I found out that the teacher had them do the same lesson, only draw their classroom the day before. She said she did it to get them ready for my lesson. I thought that was a little strange. Does she do things to get them ready for her lessons all the time? I was just a little confused. But it went okay. I just had kids saying that they did this lesson yesterday....but oh well. At least I got to teach finally. I was excited. John and I team taught a little bit. He helped me with the whole lesson and worked one on one with some of the kids as well. It worked out perfect.

Interesting week

This week only being at school one day turned out to be very interesting. Our teacher gave use notice that she wasn't going to be there on Wednesday. Once we got there, the sub came up to us and told us that we could just teach math because she hadn't gotten around to looking at the lesson for that day. So Heather were on our own to teach a lesson we had a couple of minutes to prepare for. It went well, just wish I would have had more time to prepare so I could have helped the students out more. We managed to get through it though. However, we received an email from our teacher just today and she told us due to all the snow days she was going to have to move our plans around with teaching both science and social studies units. So now its up in up in the air as far as what we will be teaching.

Time Change

Hey Ladies... Okay so my teaching partner and I switched our time in the classroom to 9-12 and I absolutely love the change. Our teacher does the majority of her "teaching" in the morning b/c so many of her students leave for various activities in the afternoon. We are now able to see her teach nearly every subject. LOVE IT!!

We are almost finished with our first units... Can you believe it? 2 more to Go!! I have one more day in this Dental Health unit... I'm going in on Friday morning to finish up the unit & I'm interested to see student behavior at the end of the week.....

I hope everyone's lessons are going smoothly as well :)

Another Week of Snow

Well, once again we did not get to go to our practicum twice this week because of snow. It is really hard when you are teaching a unit and there is so many days in between each lesson! Amy got to teach her lesson for the first time on Monday and it was great. She was focusing on map skills with the second graders and I was really impressed with how much they already knew about map skills. I was also excited to see that the students were well behaved and payed attention when Amy was teaching. I wasn't sure how well they would do since they don't usually have to sit and listen to the teacher teach for long periods of time. Amy taught for about an hour and a half and the students did great! Unfortunately, since Amy didn't get to teach her second lesson on Wed. she is going to teach her lesson this Wed. during the first half of practicum and I will teach the second half. I think this might be a little too much for the students, but we will see how it goes! I am really excited to start teaching and I hope everything works out!!

Same old thing

There hasn't been much change in my placement. I still haven't seen any teaching. I did see them getting ready for their valentines day store though. That was very interesting. The students thought it was fun at first. they were making bags, planting flowers, and making cards. after 30 minutes of doing it they all wanted to stop, but the teacher kept pushing them to get it done. One of the stuudents needed more pink hearts so she told the student to ask Mrs. Billig(Heather) to make more. The student left the room walked somewhere else in the school and got Mrs. Billie. The teacher never noticed she was gone. And when the student came back with Mrs. Billie she was like why would you do that? Didnt you think before you left? I think the question is why did the teacher notice when she walked out and was gone for like 10 minutes. Some of the students were making cards. And i guess that some of the students didnt do their "best work" and she threw them away and asked the sutdents why they would do that. And when other teachers can in the room she would loudly tell them what happened. I dont think that was right at all! So what they made a mistake, but if I was the students I wouldnt want to do it anymore. its not very encouraging for the students. with the money they are raising from there store they are doing something to help their community. The teacher doesnt let the students pick. she just said we are buying flags for some people. My question is if the students are selling the items and making them, why cant they pick where the money goes. even if it is just from a list the teacher made. errr...

Another Snow Week?

Yesterday, Heather and I went our class in the morning rather than in the afternoon like we normally do. We were afraid that the snow might start earlier than they had thought and we didn’t want to school to be dismissed early and not have another day of not going to our school. I was glad that we were able to experience their morning routine with them. We were able to experience their reading time, as well as vocabulary practice and their spelling pre-test (which I really liked how she did this process). They take a test on 10 words, what they get correct they don’t need to take a test over the ones they got correct just the ones they had missed. For the number they got correct they had to pick that many from a new list of words. I feel this is an awesome way to test the students with spelling, why make them keep writing the same words if they already got correct? Allow them to expand their spelling vocabulary, don’t hold them back.
We are thankful that our teacher is being so flexible with us due to the weather situations that we are facing, but when you’re a teacher its part of the job description I guess to be flexible. We were just glad to get back yesterday to see the kids once again before they forgot who we were and that we were able to touch base with our teacher again about what are game plan will be.

We finally got to teach

Today Maggie and I taught our first lessons. It was really neat because we team taught. We were asked to team teach because of all of the snow days. What we really did was take turns teaching a lesson. I taught the first lesson while Maggie helped out and then we switched. Our teacher has asked us to laminate our final project for her to keep because she liked it so well. She told us how well we did and gave us some pointers. Our lesson was on the presidents and we did a word web to collect information, both at the beginning of the lesson and at the end of it. The class gave us a lot of new information that they learned but when we asked them to write it down they all selected the same thing. Our CT said it was just because they are kindergarteners and not to worry about it. So if you ask ourclass what they learned about George Washington they will tell you "he died" and about Abe Lincoln, he was the "16th". Our class is so cute.

No School Again

I don't have much to say because I wasn't in my school all last week due to snow and it seems like this week is too going to prove difficult for me.

Practicum Experience

So this week was cut short due to the snow! I didn't get to see anything new related to social studies in my practicum. For the most part all Amy and I do is help the students with their independent work, since that is all they do most of the day. I have only seen my practicum teacher teach one thing and that was a writing lesson. While I love the kids in my class and really enjoy being in the practicum, I feel like I am missing out on seeing quality teaching going on since I pretty much see no teaching at all! I am a little worried about this being that next semester is student teaching and I am going to be expected to know how a good teacher teaches social studies, science, and math. Hopefully I learn a lot from our methods classes and I get to see some good teaching from that because I wont get to see much from my practicum. While I think this practicum situation is great for getting us to work one on one with the students on their work, I feel like we are getting the short end of the stick with regards to seeing good quality teaching going on. I am sure things will work out and I will just take things as they come!!

This semester is crazy!

Well, since we have not been in the classroom for over a week, I miss seeing my class. For the little time I have spent with them so far, they are still growing on me. I obviously still have not seen a soc. stud. lesson, since we were not there, but I know it will come soon. John and I were supposed to start teaching on Mon., but I have not heard back from our CT yet about if our lessons are okay to teach. So we are starting on Wed. now, which is going to stink. We do not have class the following Mon., so our lesson will get really broken up. We are rolling with the punches on this one. What can you do. I am sure we will get more snow days, its just that time of year! I hope everyones lessons go great next week.

What a Semester

So our school did not have school on Monday and Wednesday was a snow day, surprise surprise :) So we have not seen our kids in over a week. We are trying to get our lessons finished and it is completely hectic. I was suppose to start teaching on Monday but that won't be happening because everything got pushed back a day and now the lesson I was suppose to teach won't be taught until Tuesday so Abby and I are trying to figure out our schedules and talk to our CT about what is going on. This whole semester has kind of been chaotic, but welcome to the life of teaching. The one thing I have learned is it is extremely important to be flexible and just roll with the it before we all go crazy. Hope everyone had a great week and hopefully next week will be less crazy :)

Continent Song

My partner and I have yet to see our CT teach a Social Studies lesson. So that of course worries me how they are going to "take" our SS plans. But more and more everytime I am there I pick up bits of conversations that show the students are getting SS at some point during the day.

Today I was soooooo excited when the a few of the students were "playing" with the globe during recess. I started asking the girls to show me different things and tell me things about the globe ect. I asked Savanah to show me where she lived on the globe. She pointed it out correctly so I went on to ask her to tell me which continent that was. She told me Kentucky. I asked again thinking she didnt understand what I was asking and again she said the "I live on the Kentucky continent. " Understandably I was disappointed....but then Ashley jumped in and not only corrected but began singing "the continent" song that she told me her older sister taught her. It was just nice to see that the students are getting SS content. Ultimatley it doesnt matter where as long as they are getting it somewhere right?

Social Studies in the classroom

In the two weeks that I have been at my practicum school I have noticed the wide variety of social studies games and activities that are available to the second graders. Since this is a Montessori classroom, the students are not traditionally taught much social studies. However, they do independent work containing worksheets about other continents. For example, right now the students are learning about South America, so they read articles on South America and then answer questions about the stuff they just read. While this does not seem very exciting to me, my cooperating teacher does have many other enticing social studies related materials around her room. Some of the things the students love doing are puzzles of the United States, trivia games, and other hands on games. I think it is really neat to see the students voluntarily put together the puzzles of the United States during recess. They seem to enjoy the puzzles and they are discovering geography in a fun way. This has given me ideas about the types of games and resources that I will want to include in my own classroom one day.

Are You Kidding Me?

Much to mine and my partners surprise our class has no social studies text book. I completely understand that you do not need a text book to teach the students about social studies but come on no book at all is a little extreme. I have never been to a school that they did not have a social studies book. I really do like my placement but I feel like we have absolutely nothing to go from or that the teacher has very many resources for us to use. I don't think that our topic (economics) is very difficult to teach but I kind of feel like we have just been thrown into this topic without much help. She has not taught social studies since we have been there and so we are not real sure what the students are use to because they switch between science and social studies on a monthly basis. I believe both my partner and I are extremely creative and will be fine but having not much to go from is a little frustrating :/

Planning

This week we began talking to our teacher about what she would like for us to teach for our social studies unit. She quickly responded that she has a great easy and fun unit to teach....economics. Write away I had a hard time thinking of ideas that I could teach to a group of second graders. The following day when we were at the school we asked our teacher if they had a textbook to follow because to this point we had never seen one for social studies. She responded that they didn't. Heather and I then asked what we could use to plan for our lesson and she added that she had several books that we could look through to get ideas. None of the books that she had were any benefit to us, they were on other various subject not economics. Our teacher then told us that we would have to use the Internet to get ideas for coming up with a unit. To this point we did find a few good websites that might inspire a lesson later on. So if any of you have any good ideas for second grade please let us know, we could use a good idea or two.

I Hope this Placement Isn't a Waste

My practicum experience could be a lot better. Being in my teacher's classroom is very uncomfortable. When the children are doing something that they aren't suppose to be doing or they need help with a problem she yells, "Are you being a thinker?!" and "Be a thinker! You can figure it out." She jumps to conclusions too quickly and yells for no reason. On the first day she didn't even introduce us to the students. When I asked my teacher when she teaches math, science, and social studies she told me that she teaches math in the morning. But science and social is hard to teach because the students don't know how to read. I was so shocked when she said that to me. I also haven't seen ANY instruction. My teacher has no classroom management skills. The students do whatever they want. If I was the teacher of her class I would move students around so that they wouldn't keep talking to each other, and I wouldn't have to keep yelling at them for the same reason. She loudly tells students what they are doing that she doesn't like. Which I think is very inappropriate. There is no need to do that to first graders. If I was a student in her class I would be scared to be in her class, and I would probably fake sick everyday so that I could stay home. If I was a parent and I saw her treating my child like that I wouldn't want them in her class. The three hours that I am there, I have not seen her ONCE stand up and teach anything. I haven't seen math, science, or social studies. So it has been really hard to decide what I am going to teach. Its hard to know because I have nothing to go off how she teaches.

It's a small world

I was talking to my teacher yesterday, while we were cutting out hearts for a lesson, and found out that her mom was my 4th grade reading teacher. She also told me that she dated my physical education teacher and my principal from high school, and her Aunt and Uncle lived accross the street from me for years. They used to have the biggest Christmas parties so it is highly probable that I have met her before at one of their parties. Did I mention that her Aunt and Uncle were the librarians at my elementary and high school. What a small world.