Today went well. I was not incredibly nervous to get in front of the students, but I do have a healthy level of fear and respect for my cooperating teacher and therefore am continually concerned that I am not teaching up to her standards. My cooperating teacher is incredibly kind and has been so accommodating to help me get as much experience as possible and to guide me through the most effective way to teach her class. But she also has been doing this for like 15 years, which can be quite intimidating! After the day was over, I asked for feedback and she gave me a lot of really kind words about my classroom management techniques, my organization, and my thorough planning. I really appreciated the encouragement.
Third grade seems out of my comfort zone. They need so much guidance and direction. And relationship building doesn’t seem to come as natural to me with this age group. But I also might be judging prematurely.
Language Arts time was actually a lot better than I expected it to be. We did a really in depth look at what are different parts of a trickster tale, and then later in the day they got to put this into practice while writing their own trickster tale. Tomorrow we are starting to use ipad to create a presentation so I am slightly nervous for that. I found that in 5th grade, I had way too high of expectations as to what the students would be able to do with the ipads. They were not very good at researching and they didn’t know how to save images and then access them again to use them in a presentation. I am going to walk the 3rd graders through the process step by step, but I am really banking on them having some prior knowledge with this too.
Before they wrote their own trickster tale, we did an example as a class. I thought I would have to do this for them, but they kept giving such great suggestions and building off of each other’s comments that I just let them take it. They are so creative! And the story ended up being quite splendid!
We didn’t have time for our vocabulary game so I will have to fit that in tomorrow, which means I probably won’t have time for phonics tomorrow, which means I will have to fit that in later in the week... oh flexibility!
In Social Studies we are creating culture books which I am super excited about. The students are doing journals every day, documenting elements of their family culture, and recording what we learn about Navajo culture. Today our focus was “culture” in general and introducing a lot of the plan for the week. Lessons are short and go very quickly, but I am learning to use time more efficiently. Tomorrow we do jigsaw method. I have never actually used this in a classroom so we will see how it goes!
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