Oops I forgot to write a reflection for last week. This is my second week of teaching 80-100% and I am loving it. This was also the first week I had a student tell me I was mean. I had dreaded this moment before because in the beginning of my practicum I was worried about hurting my students feelings. After a conversation with my SA I knew I had to become more firm with the students in order to maintain classroom management. These feelings mixed with my growth throughout my practicum led me to smile when this student told me I was mean. He said I was mean but I saw that he recognized my efforts as caring and working to ensure he could get the most out of his first year of school.
For the past several months each week we have been doing a book of letters lesson, looking at one letter each week. Due to the repetition of these lessons many of my students complete the exercise quickly. I have been trying to think of ways to encourage them to take more time with the activity or to choose to do more pictures/words with the corresponding letter. To try to capture more of their involvement I began to ask if they had any additional words with the letter of the week to add to the previously made document shown on the projector.
This has allowed students to personalize this exercise because they thought of words that were from their lives (for example the name of a character from Paw Patrol, a gaming console, or words they remember form the song that goes with the letter). This week I talked to the students about how I noticed some people are finishing really fast and I explained that that tells me that the activity might be too easy for them, thus I asked them to challenge themselves. I explained this by saying maybe they could try to draw more than the required four pictures or to write more words if they didn’t want to draw more pictures. This clearly struck a chord with many of the students, specifically one that often struggles with focusing and copying/writing the words. This particular student needs reminders to stay on task and often tries to leave it unfinished to more on to his exploring time. This week, when I asked him to draw another picture and then he would be finished he replied with “No, I’m going to do 3 more because I’m challenging myself.” Naturally there were still those who finished quickly but I sent the first few back to write and draw another word while asking them to challenge themselves.
This week the music teacher was sick which meant music class was cancelled because there was no sub. To make up for missing their music time I thought on my feet to create a music activity to do with the students before recess. I gathered geoboards with elastics on them (guitars), cups with several blocks inside of them (maracas), and sets of Keva blocks (sticks) for my instruments.
Next I drew pictures on the whiteboard to correspond to each instrument. I used a pointer and had students make sound with their instruments when the pointer was at their picture. I then began to add a second row which meant each spot I pointed to had two instruments playing together and later added a third row. I also had students switch instruments twice to ensure they had the chance to try each one. Additionally, I mixed up the order of instruments to play by pointing out of order. The smiles on students’ faces when I told them to pat themselves on their back for such a great job told me they too enjoyed the activity.
I’ve had a great two weeks being the primary classroom teacher and I am excited to have two more weeks of it.