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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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![]() 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 ![]() This week was a light homework week for us residents, this coming week holds the promise of being a busy week even with two of our classes having online modules. I had a blast with my second graders this week! On Valentines Day I bought donuts for my kids for when they finished their morning work and even though I missed out on the party, I still got a few sweet things from my babies. In social studies this week we examined who writes history with two articles labeled who writes history? and The Rosa Parks Myth. Both articles examined the different perspectives and how the story can look different depending on who tells the story. The authors gave an example of how to teach students how to think critically of the things they read. You give each half of the class the same story except for half of the class gets the story from a different perspective and then discuss what happened as a class. The main example was the story of Columbus and the finding of America as well as the real story of Rosa Parks. Students need to master the skill of thinking critically about text so they don't believe everything they read. Then in integrating exceptional students into the classroom we spoke at length about RtI (Response to Intervention) and we even played RtI bingo which made for a very attentive class. We learned that RtI was data grounded and is used to bridge the gap for students who are below grade level. This is an early intervention for students and is used to help identify learning disabilities. There are three tiers, with each tier there are less and less students and more support. And that's 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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