And that's all for this week,
Ms. Brookes
Kindergarten. 12 little letters that usually makes all intermediate teachers run away or simply shake their heads. I won't pretend that when schools and grade levels for final internships were announced and I was placed in Kindergarten that I was thrilled. I wasn't. In fact, I was annoyed that I was changing schools, CT's, and grade level. But if UTRPP has taught me anything and it has taught me a lot, its to be flexible and that every experience is a learning one. So in August, off to Kindergarten I went and in a few short weeks later in love with Kindergarten I fell. At times, its so tough and frustrating that I want to give up but then my babies get it or my CT and I find away to the impossible lessons work. As the days tick down to graduation and the idea of getting hired is becoming a reality, I know that I'll be applying for every primary position available, especially Kindergarten.
And that's all for this week, Ms. Brookes
0 Comments
Happy Belated Valentines Day! This past Friday was our Valentines Day celebration which meant candy, love, and presents galore. Since starting my track to becoming a teacher I've felt so blessed by my students on Valentines Day and this year was no different, I had 18 Kindergarteners to be my Valentines and I was excited to give them the small gifts I got them. Pictured above are the Hershey Kiss rings I made using this link, my kids loved them and wore them out of class that afternoon. Also pictured above was that days morning activity which was reading to yourself somewhere in the room, as I was circulating I saw three of my kiddos doing this and my heart melted. My kids love each other and show it all the time.
Since the beginning of last semester, I've been working on my teacher inquiry. I choose to research into the implementation of Conscious Discipline into a classroom. For data, I've been tracking positive and negative in the classroom. We use Class Dogo as the positive reinforcement, when students are working hard, following directions, or just doing the right thing they can earn points to spend at the classroom store each Friday. We also use a strip system, each colored strip represents the expected behaviors in the classroom we used the behaviors in the report card to create the strips, when students continue to not follow the expected behavior they can pull a strip. I've been tracking both of these for the last two months and I've also been struggling to show this data in a chart. This week I had spent several hours using Excel to get my data into a more manageable form and after many hours, some tears, and numerous spread sheets later I was finally able to get my data into a graph that made sense. This week also started my math coaching cycle which I always identify as my worst subject both as a student and a teacher. I've chosen to work on reasoning abstractly and quantitatively as my goal for this session. I want my students to start asking themselves questions as they solve math problems and to encourage them to think through whats going on when we are solving problems. Monday brings our new math unit which is counting from 1- 100, I'll be planning for the week and I am looking forward to tapping into some of the resources provided by my teacher. And that's all for this week, Ms. Brookes This week was a busy, busy week. The week started with the 100th day of school, which meant celebrating the growth of students over the past 100 days. Then Wednesday rolled around and that brought STEM Fair and STEM Fair judging which was a lot of talking to students and reading science journals. By the end of the week it seems that everyone was glad that Friday was Fair Day and that most of us would not have to attend school.
The sign (pictured above) was part of Kindergartens celebration, my collaborating teacher created something similar the year before and it had been a big hit. It was really sweet watching our Kindergarteners react to walking through it, a few thought you were supposed to touch it and crawled underneath it to get into the room but most were excited to walk through and feel the paper on their faces. It was a crazy fun day, and my teacher and I spent some time discussing how much our kids have grown in the past 100 days. Dr. Davis gave some wonderful prompts to respond to about STEM Fair judging, the one I choose to use is In what ways did your participation in the STEM Fair connect with your learning from SCE 4310? I felt my science classes learning throughout the day at STEM Fair. Science is social, (a nature of science standard) the students came up with projects they were interested in and then created a project that matched what they had chosen to work on. The students then spent time in groups or individually working of these projects, after which they were judged to see if they were going onto the next step of STEM Fair. When the kids got to us, the STEM Fair judges, they then had to explain what they had done and answer any questions we had about what they did. It amazed me how knowledgable some students were about what they had done, they had spent so much time working to create the results of what they did and it was awesome getting to watch them speak about what they had learned. Pictured above in the name tag given to the judges. I just wanted to post about how wonderful it is to have such a close and connected group of individuals who support each other as we approach graduation. Pictured above is a coffee cup a near and dear friend of mine let me use when I spent the night at her house because I left my keys elsewhere and she was kind enough to drive me to school the next morning for class. I've linked her blog below because she's an amazing friend and fellow teacher. http://rebeccafiore.weebly.com/blog And that's all for this week, Ms. Brookes It's hard to believe that today is the first month of February and that in a few short months I'll be graduating and moving onto finding a job for the upcoming school year. For now, I'm watching my Kindergarteners grow into first graders which is amazing and scary at the same time.
This week we introduced beginning, middle, and end formally. On Monday, we used the poem "Little Miss Muffet" for the students to begin to identify the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. We used a graphic organizer and the poem to show students the beginning, middle, and end, instead of having the students write on the first day of learning this content we waited until day two. The next day, we reviewed beginning, middle, and end using the graphic organizer from the day before, I had students retell the poem using what we had written the day before. After reviewing, we jumped into our new poem and nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty". I wrote the poem on a piece of chart paper to allow for all students to have access to the text as well as to circle the beginning, middle, and end as they were identified. Pictured above shows the final product. After identifying the beginning, middle, and end students were then given there own graphic organizer (which matched the one used the day before) and sent off to identify the parts. Something that surprised me about my students was that all were able to correctly identify the beginning and middle but for the ending they had written the next sentence which was "And all the kings horses and all the kings men" instead of saying that they couldn't put him together again. This realization made me think that we needed to talk about summarizing or thinking about what we write because most of my kiddos had just copied and not thought about it. On a side note, this lesson was a relatively short lesson which always leaves me with the feeling that I haven't taught enough or I haven't spent enough time going over the content with the students. I conveyed this feeling to my CT who helped remind me that the county encourages teachers to do 10-15 minute lessons and then allow students to work on their own. That it is best teaching practice to give students the most time possible to work things out while being there to catch them before they frustrate out. And that's all for this week, Ms. Brookes |
Archives
February 2015
Categories
All
|