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And thats all for this week,
Ms. Brookes
![]() Its the end of the semester, the stress is slowly ebbing and I am worn out. I successfully finished my Story of Professional Learning today and submitted a majority of my assignments. Last night, I had a nightmare about waking up when I was supposed to be presenting my project and I hadn't finished it yet then I woke up and realized it was 5 am and it was Sunday. This past weekend has been all about reflection and looking back on the semester. I realized that I'm walking away from this semester a different person than I was when I started. I've learned about differentiation and how that can be done, the difference between close read and cloze read, and how important Social Studies is for students. Overall, this semester has been really wonderful for learning and I can't wait to see what England has in store for me. And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes
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![]() Three weeks until Spring 2014 is finished and Summer 2014 begins. Classes have flown by this semester, it was January what felt like moments ago and now we are days away from April being half over. I am ready for the stress of this semester to be over but not ready for the stress of Summer to begin. This week in my classroom we studied poetry, one of the specific types of poems we examined was acrostic poems and created our own as a class. (Top Picture) This week was also great for my inquiry, I collected a number of useful pieces for question. On Monday, we worked through creating a performance task with a rubric during class as most things involving teaching everything is harder than previously imagined. Each time we meet for planning, we discover than planning is extremely important for executing meaningful lessons. This related to Friday's class on disabilities, students who require more support academically require more planning to help give them what they need to be the most successful. And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes ![]() The end is near, 26 days until summer! (Including weekends and holidays) This week was conference night, we requested conferences with every parent this time around because this is around the time that students are in danger of being retained. We had more than five conferences on Thursday with phone conferences and conferences on other days scheduled for other days. The pictures above are just a snapshot into my week, the first picture is a bulletin board I decorated this week for our lesson on fractions. The students created flowers with 2, 3, or 4 petals and then wrote the fractions for the numbers. The second picture is a note one of my students gave me, thanking me for reading books for them and being nice. The third picture is an email telling me I won my first book on Goodreads.com! The last picture is the back of the shirt for my study aboard program in England, I was in charge of the shirts and I picked them up on Friday between classes. Overall, this week was awesome. The week started off with no class for Instructional Planning which meant sleeping in! In Social Studies, we read articles about women's role in history and how while women weren't being allowed to participate in everyday activities with the same rights as men. Women were marginalized but history never fully recognizes the double marginalized group of women who were women and black. It's important to teach children about the struggles of all people and not just one particular group. On Wednesday, we finished our unit on social justice and we spent time figuring out what events and particular people of importance we would want to teach and why. It was nice having our classes give really great teaching ideas on the same subject. And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes ![]() The week before Spring Break felt both long and short at the same time. My students went on a field trip on Friday and I wasn't able to attend because of a meeting for Cambridge. My heart had plans of sleeping in but my brain had other ideas like making the homework copies and moving all the ELMO carts to the library, So at 7:30 am, I was at school per my usual Friday morning routine with a new tie dye shirt made just for the field trip I couldn't attend. In other educational news, this Monday we learned the true meaning of V.I.A.G.R.A (Varied Instruction Across Groups Raising Achievement) when it comes differentiated instruction curtsy of one of our professors. After learning more about differentiated instruction, we created a think-tac-toe with the group we worked with last week. As it almost always goes, we discovered that its much harder to differentiate than we originally thought. The pattern seems to be that creating an activity that works for different levels of students is much more difficult because of how time consuming it truly is. Social Studies that day brought about a nagging feeling of not doing enough to help the world, we talked about what our students are going through at home and how that truly affects them in school. After looking at this website http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/moments-in-america-for-children.html we came to the realization that our kids are going through so much at home and most times are trying to survive. After talking through a lot of hard issues and subjects, we created our wild sides with the website http://www.buildyourwildself.com/. It was a fun way to end class as well as get a resource to use in our classrooms for the beginning of the year activity. And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes ![]() Its official! We are officially over a month into the Spring semester, which seems crazy that in a few months the level three's graduate and I'll be on my way to England. This week was a short week, we were in school for four days due to Friday being Fair Day for the students, some schools closed while others used it as a work day. My school stayed open but my CT took comp time and I didn't intern on Friday, class was also cancelled that day. It was nice to have a day off, sleeping in, lunch with a friend, and then the Cambridge meeting made for a relaxing day. The pictures for this week include a magazine shared with us by our social studies professor,math tests being graded, and my boyfriends Valentine's Day present. This week focused on culture and the way it plays into the classroom. We touched on culture in social studies the main image our professor used was an iceberg model, the tip of the iceberg represents the things you can see about someone culture and the bottom of the iceberg represents what you can't see about culture. Another article spoke about the seven Mitch's about Native Americans, such as Indians get special privileges or that all American Indians live on a reservation. This relates to the classroom because if a child identifies as Native American or another race and the teacher calls upon the child to speak about their culture and that child knows nothing about their culture then you are putting the child on the spot. In the last article for social studies, it talked about teaching strategies for open-mindedness: 1) make cross-cultural interaction ordinary 2) challenge stereotyping, prejudgement, and over generalization 3) demonstrate ways to learn from ordinary people 4) teach the habit of seeking out multiple perspective. In using the four strategies in everyday practice teachers can help children to grow up to be more open minded. In intermediate literacy, we watched a video and discussed common core. The main idea behind common core is preparing students for college, career or military, or just giving them the knowledge to do whatever they want after they graduate. The students master a skill in the younger grades and them they build as the students go up in grade level. And that's all for this week, Ms. Brookes |
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