Week 2 (:

1. Describe your teaching day.

This past week has been amazing! - I taught my very first lesson Wednesday on persuasive writing. I was super nervous the entire night before and stayed up until about 1:30 am worrying that my lesson would not be engaging enough to teach thirty 4th graders and just making sure I had everything prepared but overall, my lesson was fantastic! I started out my lesson by reading a story to the students and my field supervisor said that I read with great enthusiasm and had good facial expressions to accompany the story. I then split the students up into groups and we did a graffiti activity that turned out really well. One suggestion my field supervisor had for me was to have smaller groups during the activity next time, rather than my three groups of ten which was a little harder to have all students participate, but overall I think my first lesson was great and I was able to teach a successful and fun lesson.

2. Describe your favorite part of the day.

My favorite part of my teaching day is during what my cooperating teacher calls M&M (Move and Munch) time. I enjoy this part of my day so much because I get to move around the classroom, munching on yummy snacks, while interacting with the students. Just the other day during M&M, two girls came up to me and asked if they could show me their dance. I of course encouraged them and they started singing and doing this really amazing choreographed dance to One Direction's, “One Thing” which was too cute.

3. What went well, what didn't work so well, and what would you change or do differently?

    My field partner and I have been using the fill-in-the-square classroom management technique to accompany our lessons and it has worked out really well for us so far. Instead of the fill-in-the-square idea that we learned about in class, we printed out a cute black and white picture of a turkey (because were doing a turkey persuasive writing unit) and are having the students color-in a section of their turkey when we spot rewarding behavior.

    As I mentioned earlier, my first lesson went well, but the next time I teach a graffiti activity I will definitely make sure I change the size of my groups so that they are smaller and maybe add more graffiti posters so that each student has the opportunity to have an input on what to write.

4. To help your students you would…

I feel that I will walk around the classroom more, especially during math time, to try and help out those more shy students who might be too embarrassed to come up and ask for help directly.

I have really enjoyed my field experience so far and can’t believe that our time is almost coming to an end! I feel that I have grown attached to thirty wonderfully bright students in just a short time and it will be so sad to part with them. Hopefully I can be able to become a full time teacher soon! (: