Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Phabulous Phonics!

Today was a great day. I taught four "subjects" - which made me feel like a real teacher! It was great.

I started the morning off with phonics. We learned about -y words, such as sky and try and fishy and swishy. We did jumping jacks to practice our high frequency words and practiced our -y rule with a worksheet. I got the opportunity to work with small groups during Daily Five to work on skills such as ABC order, syllable-segmenting, and long/short vowel sounds. As usual, I parallel taught math. It was fun to show kids the meaning of equivalence using a pan scale!

The day went by pretty quickly. And no train wrecks! That's always a blessing :)

Can't wait to continue with this journey and add on language arts next week!

- Miss Turner :)

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Art!

Today, I had the fabulous opportunity to help out with art club. This is a special club for fifth-graders who love art! I had a great time and they were very self-sufficient. Much different than those needy first-graders! :-) I also taught my second math lesson today. I already feel more comfortable with it and the kids seem to be responding pretty well to my teaching.I am excited to begin teaching phonics next week, and to start working with small groups of students on basic literacy skills and phonics. Teaching is pretty exhausting! I'm only a few days and I'm already beginning to understand just how much work it is to be a teacher. Can't wait to continue on this great journey.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Week 2 begins!

Today I taught my first lesson! For math, my sup. teacher and I are doing a parallel teaching format, so we each teach the same lesson to one half of the class. We learned about using a function machine and applying rules to find inputs/outputs (yes...this is first grade!!) Overall, I think it went well. I tend to get a little frazzled at times, but I did a pretty good job being clear and doing lots of modeling before releasing responsibility. I will be grading my group's independent work tonight to see how well they understood the content!

I am starting to really get into the swing of things and I'm excited to tackle even more lessons and duties!

- E T

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Ready...Set...Go!

Hello! I'm now officially two days into my student teaching experience. (That's two down, seventy-eight to go!)

Though I've really just been observing so far, I'm already starting to enjoy it and feel at home at CWE. I love so many things about the class. The students are really smart and, for the most part, well-behaved. The day is structured in a really organized way and it flows very nicely. I really like how my teacher sets up Daily Five and Math rotations. And...we get to do fun brain breaks! (Brain breaks are my favorite time of day. I mean, Koo Koo Kangaroo?! It's the best.)

I am excited to start teaching! I have a lot of ideas, which I hope I can somehow incorporate into the highly scripted and structured atmosphere. My teacher and I met with my university supervisor today to discuss the basics and schedule observations. Really, I'm raring to go! I am very nervous about classroom management, as I probably always (?) will be. But it's something I really wanna work on and I'm excited to get started.

Also, we had a two hour delay today...and we have one tomorrow! Yay for sleeping in.

I'll post again when something exciting happens ;)

- E