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 Hello April, goodbye March! While the Spring semester is starting to come to a close, the classwork load is coming to a all time high. Its hard to believe that in about a month I'll be a senior in college with one more year left until graduation and becoming a teacher! This week we only had Instructional Planning and Social Studies, in planning we spent our time working with assessment, essential questions, and writing a unit plan. After working with Tracy a bit, I decided to sit down with my collaborating teacher and get some help with tackling the unit plan. I'm always amazed and blessed by what asking can get you, my teacher was able to help me work through almost all the kinks in my unit out and gave me wonderful ideas to use in planning. Then in Social Studies, we worked with online graphs (pictured above) and how we can use technology in our classroom for students to create something or see the trends in things going around in the world or in the classroom. P.S: Conference night is this week! I'm super excited! And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes As the semester comes to a close, I can't help but look back at the beginning of my experience with the residency and how it has begun to shape me into the person I've always wanted to be. I can honestly say that being accepted into UTRPP has changed my view of being a teacher and everything that goes into preparing to become a teacher to leading a classroom on your own. Each day it has seemed that I've discovered that there is another skill to master! Teaching, it seems, takes practice in every aspect like making copies or the language you use when teaching a lesson. This semester linked together literacy, classroom management, literature, and a child's development. Each class connected to each other, what we learned in emergent literacy was reiterated in children's literature, both classes sparked a love for literature and how much importance it holds in children's lives. We learned that literature has a powerful affect on students, its a wonderful starter for a unit or way to expose children to the vocabulary they need to grow. In classroom management and child development we learned the reasoning behind why children misbehave and how our teaching styles play a large role in how our classroom runs. As the days start counting down to when the semester ends, I find myself wondering how the time went by so quickly and while I'll enjoy the time off of school I know I'll miss my second grade babies. And thats all for this week, Ms. Brookes |
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