Last week I mentioned that my CT and I did some rearranging in the classroom, which included moving the overhead projector to a place that was comfortable for me to teach from, up in front of the classroom. Well I am happy to report that I really do like this arrangement. When I am teaching, I am able to see our students faces, which has proved to be very beneficial when I am trying to explain something. While I was teaching math, I saw that a student was confused on a concept, so I was able to assist her. If I was still in the back of the classroom, I would not have been able to see her confusion. I am really grateful that I had this opportunity to test out how I like to teach, and what I am comfortable with.
At my school, Literacy Week was last week, where the students celebrated literacy by wearing reading related things to school, counting the number of minutes their class read for the week, and decorating a door of the class’ favorite book. The book we picked was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. This week, we were finally able to finish decorating our door. This was a project I took on, and I wanted to make it about the students. I pulled a group of the well behaved students in our classroom and I asked them about ideas for decorating the door. We decided that we wanted to make the cover of The Giving Tree for our door. We cut out blue for the sky and made a tree with two branches, with a big apple in the middle saying the title and author of the book. I then had all of the students in the class color two leaves for the tree. They were to write their favorite part of the book and something that they would give up on the leaves. When they were colored and cut out, I had the students tape them onto the tree. It was during this time that our principal came in to observe the class. She came up with the idea to trace the students writing with black sharpie to make it stand out more, which was an awesome idea. I also loved that I got to see the principal getting involved with the students. Overall, I thought the tree turned out really cute! I also liked this idea because it was a fun way to connect reading and writing. It is very seldom that the students have a chance to relax and do their work, so I thought they would enjoy this because they got to color while working on their writing.
My CT connected reading and writing in another way this week as well. In class, we have been working on improving our students writing. My CT and I wanted to find a way to teach our students how to make their stories have really great beginnings. My CT picked out a few books that had different beginnings like Vroom, Chugga, Vroom-Vroom by Anne Miranda which started with an onomatopoeia, and Own Moon by Jane Yolen which started with dialogue. She read the beginnings of these books, and having the students identify their beginnings. Our hope was that the children would use these ways to being their stories. In all of my literature classes last semester, and even this semester, we learned that it is so important to integrate reading and writing within all of the subjects. I thought that this was a neat way to show how literature could be used to teach concepts in writing.
In seminar, we have been reading The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research by Dana and Yendol-Hoppey. This book tells about teacher inquiry which is a “systematic, intentional study of one’s own professional practice” (6), which is basically analyzing and trying to improve your practice as a teacher. The book tells about eight possible passions that teacher can choose as the subject of their inquiry. Mine is the desire to improve or experiment with teaching strategies and teaching techniques. I picked this topic because I would like to improve some of my teaching strategies. I would like to improve on my management abilities, actually putting what I learned in my management class into practice. I also picked this because I want to learn how to better question my students so they get the most out of each lesson.
In my integrating exceptional students class, I have been reading about Response to Intervention (RtI). Before coming into this program, I have heard about RtI, but I never really understood its purpose. But now that I am able to really read about it and see it happening every day in my class, I have a better understanding of its purpose and why it is so important in the classroom. RtI had the ability to help and give every student the extra support they need. In the beginning of the school year, we had RtI groups in my classroom for every student. We had some students switching classrooms to focus on specific abilities with other students who needed improvement in those areas. This semester, I got to see how some students needed to be moved into tier 3 because they were not making adequate progress, and how other students stayed in tier 2 because they are making progress. One of our students may even need to have a more serious intervention than tier 3 because he is still significantly below level, making little progress. Being able to see RtI in the classroom is really beneficial to me because this will be something I will use every day when I am a teacher.
Next week will be a full week and I am excited to see what is has in store for me!