Day 2 at Hope

Today I reviewed the sounds: /ng/ and /nk/ with my students.  I asked them what words they knew that ended with these sounds.  Then we did some activities on the Mimeo to practice using those sounds. This is an example of one of my Mimeo slides.  They like being involved with the lesson.  These activities help them understand how these sounds are used in words.  The challenging part was helping them understand that the "g" in "ng" doesn't have the same /g/ sound.  I had a lot of fun with my students today, and they seemed to understand the sounds.  After practicing on the Mimeo, they did a worksheet to check for their understanding of the sounds.

 

Molly Dorth- Week 2 Day 1 Reflection

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!

Language Arts Day 1

My half an hour flew by today.  The students loved the fact that they were learning to write letters from a book even though some of the students had already heard the story.  After hearing the story though the students were able to list all the parts that needed to be included in a letter.  They surprised themselves that they were able to complete this on the first try.  When it came to writing a letter together, they started to get confused and I heard some students say think back to the story that we heard.  What an amazing day to see these students at work, I cannot wait to see what they come up with when they are writing their own letters.

Holy cow! The 45 minutes I had to complete my first lesson flew by. The students were in engaged and I had high participation. The only downfall was the students were so eager to share they often blurted out.  We are studying the Revolutionary War in history and reading about it in Language Arts. It is going to be great for the students to make these connections. I am glad I started with a quick write because the students had many misconceptions relating to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. I also picked up an extra 40 minutes of teaching spelling/ phonics.

Day 2! -Morgan Lueck

Day 1:
Today in Language Arts with my 3^rd and 4^th graders we began our week on writing stories.  The students were very hyper today, and I found myself redirecting them many times during independent work time.  The beginning of the lesson went well.  I read the story The Paper Bag Princess to them, and they were very engaged in the story.  I asked the students questions after the story I found only two students answering my questions.  I made sure to call on the other two students and ask them at least one question about what they thought.  After the read aloud I talked about a main character in a story and had the students fill out a worksheet coming up with a main character for the story they will be creating.  I had one student who was being silly during this time, because he was being very unreal when creating his main character.  He wanted his character to be 4 days old, and I talked to him and asked him questions on how he was going to create a story this way.  He ended up switching his ideas and came up with a great main character.  The students next played around on the app Scribble Press to come up with an idea of what their character looks like.  (The app changed from being free to $2.99 by the way!)  To end the class I had the students write a couple of paragraphs about each character they are going to have in their stories.  The students had about 10 minutes to work on this and whatever they did not finish was to be completed as homework.  I found my students working hard during this time!  I can’t wait to see how creative they will be tomorrow. :)

Day 1 at HOPE

Today was my first day teaching Phonics during PST to my first graders.  They learned that /kw/ sound is spelled qu.  I introduced the sound by showing them this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZyrgXYRAjo.  They loved it.  Then I read a short story to them about a duck that couldn't quack right.  They were involved by repeating /kw/ /kw/ /kw/ /kw/ the way that I said it (softly, loudly, quickly, slowly, and normal).  Then I had them do a picture short of pictures that start and don't start the /kw/ sound.  Then we did reading groups.  I felt confident throughout this entire lesson.  Since I've been at Hope all semester, I'm very familiar with how Miss Drager does her Phonics lessons.  They kids seemed to understand the new sound they learned, and they had fun learning it.

8th Grade English: Day 1 

English went extremely well.  I was told that the students were not excited to start poetry week but I was amazed at their willingness to read poems in front of the class as well as to create and read their own poems.  Students were broken into groups and had the opportunity to look through some poetry books.  When given the opportunity, half of the students chose to read a poem they liked out loud.  The students really enjoyed the “Verses Poetry” and “Poetry Magnet” applications.  They created their own poems and again some of them volunteered to share theirs with the class.  The students were engaged and listened throughout the class period.  They came up with excellent examples of alliteration and were able to brainstorm a list of topics for their upcoming poems.  When writing the poems we had a student led discussion on whether or not poems had to rhyme.  It was interesting to hear what the students thought about rhyming and poetry in general.    Eighth grade is a very creative group and I am excited to see the poems they write in the upcoming days!