A much needed break...

One more day of school until break starts! This Holiday Vacation is going to be a much needed one. This break gives me a chance to re-charge my batteries and prepare myself mentally to take over the classroom when I get back in the new year. I'm going to take some time at home to enjoy putting my feet up relaxing and finally getting to sleep in. Two weeks is a long time to be away from the classroom so I am going to take advantage of that free time and try to get some planning in. I hope to have my portfolio and lesson plan outlines squared away before the first of the year. I want to be ahead of the game before I actually take over the entire class so I am not stressing over everything when it does come time to take on the class. It's Christmas BREAK, best time of the year!

Around the World

Everyone has played Around the World in elementary school. Some love it, others loathe it. I am one of those fortunate souls that loved around the world, probably because I was good at it. One student in my class is great at the game, so great that he has given up playing because he beats everyone with ease. Instead of participating in the game, he gives up and lets the challenger waltz by him. I was brainstorming today and thinking of a way I could involve him in this activity even though he has mastered rote memorization of his math facts. I thought about giving him harder problems or have him answer more than one, but I already know he knows his facts and I already know he will answer them faster than everyone else, he wouldn't be improving. While writing a paper for my teaching class I came up with the idea of having him lead the game. Why not have him up in front of the class setting an example for the other students because he is so good at his math facts? This not only includes him in the activity, but it also gives students incentive to do better and try harder during around the world. I have not had the opportunity to try this out yet, but I am thinking it will happen very soon. Stay tuned...

A Different Beat

There are some students that you just cannot figure out. Some students sharpen their pencils at any available moment just so they don't have to listen to you talk. Some students raise their hands at every waking moment, craving your attention. Some students sit in the back and shy away at the chance of speaking in front of the class. Other students are in their own little world, thinking their own thoughts and beating to their own drum. These students, I have come to find, may be the brightest and most intelligent of the bunch.

I have two such students in my class this year. Both intelligent, but they both lacking social and organizational skills. These two students struggle to turn in work and stay on track with everyone else in the class. When work is turned in, it usually is graded well. But that's the problem. WORK IS RARELY TURNED IN. I want to be able to harness their intelligence so that they can succeed in class.

Today, one of the students that "beats to their own drum", came up to me after everyone had left for the buses and asked me "why is the magnetic south pole not at the bottom of the map in the center of Antarctica?" It took me a second to contemplate why that was. I couldn't think of the answer of the top of my head and I told the student that I would have to look that information up for him because I really didn't know the answer. A few seconds after my response, he said "well...maybe it's because the earth is tilted on an axis and that's why the magnetic south is there." It is things like this that make me wonder what is going on in his head. Once every week or so my CT and I will sit staring at each other scratching our heads at the information this student knows. This was one of those moments.

Every mind is unique as is every person. It is my job to harness each students strengths so that they will be successful in life. How do I support these students so that they can be successful in life? Does having a messy desk contribute to a messy future? Or does not turning in your work on time (or ever)) equate to a life full of tardiness?

These are all answers I need to investigate during my internship. Who knows I could have the next Einstein in my class and I don't even know it because I am too worried about neatness and organization.

Interactive Lit Circles

Last week, my class tried approaching their literature circle meeting a little differently. Our class "met" online to conduct their first ever literature circle on the web. Groups met for 10 minutes before they went to the lab to discuss questions and thoughts on the chapters they had read. Each member of the group was to post a comment about their job for the literature circle meeting. Here is a look at our class's first digital meeting.

The next time our class meets in the computer lab for something like this I would like to encourage students to respond to others comments. The aspect that was missing in this activity was there was not much interaction between the groups. Although students had the chance to look at each others responses no students responded back. The whole point of meeting in literature circles is to have students interact with each other to deepen their understanding of the book they are reading. Communicating through different mediums is important, especially in the digital age. This activity, if guided appropriately with increased interaction between students, could be very beneficial to students communication and computer skills.

Family Science Night

Two weeks ago I took part in the Family Science night at our school. I was fortunate enough to teach a 30 minute segment as a part of the science night experience. Students, parents and guardians from each grade 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th showed up to participate in some exciting science activities. The event started with opening activities where students played with tuning forks, created their own bottle of ethanol and did other crazy things that involved blowing up pop bottles! After the opening activities students, parents and guardians were split up to go to my activity (balloon rockets) or the other interns (bridge buidling) activity. Both the other intern and I planned 30 minute activities for our respective groups. After 30 minutes, the groups would switch and we would go through our lesson again. My activity involved students making balloon rockets. Students and parents were to use two chairs, string, straw and a balloon to construct a rocket that would travel on the string. The point of the activity was to measure the speed of the rocket. Students and parents had a blast and so did I. One thing that was really tough during my activities was controlling everyone. Having balloons, string and the "word" rocket in your lesson and you are bound for some hyper children and some parents! If you think teaching 27 students is tough, try 80 and be thankful you only have 27. I thought crowd control would be easy since parents would be there, sorry to say, it wasn't. I learned my lesson, but I had a great time and I hope I have some kind of family event liek this in my future school!

MSU Technology Conference

This Saturday was the 26th annual College of Education Technology Conference at MSU. Getting up early on a Saturday wasn't my favorite thing to do, but this conference was definitely worth the early wake-up. I learned about many innovative technology resources for for use in the classroom. It was really exciting to see all of the enthusiastic teachers come together to learn about things that will help make education even more meaningful for our students. I was bombarded with tons of helpful websites that I will be posting and using in the near future. One of the things I really want to utilize is Google Earth. I sat through an interesting workshop on "Lit Trips". Lit Trips use Google Earth to visually show students the path of events in books or anything else you can think of (where you have lived, where you are going for spring break, etc.) Look forward to the link section on this blog to be extensively longer in the near future, what a good/useful day!

Literature Circles

Our class has been working in literature circles the past week or so. In lit circles, students gather together to discuss a piece of literature. This is how our circles have worked so far...

The students are split into 4 groups and meet with their group 2-3 times a week. Each day before the meeting students have 40-50 minutes to read their assigned chapters and complete their assigned role. Each group member has a specific role they must fulfill during the meeting. Students have the opportunity to fulfill a new role each meeting. The roles are as follows; discussion director, checker, illustrator, summarizer, connector, literary luminary, and vocab enricher.


So far, meetings have been extremely successful and that may be partly due to the amount of practice each student has had with each role. I prepared lessons for each role that provided students the opportunity to ask questions and understand their expectations for each role. Literature circles are completely student driven and all responsibility is on each student to complete their assignment.

The hardest part about lit circles is managing all of them at once. I can only be in one place at one time. I try to spread myself out and get to every group, but sometimes that doesn't always happen. I often focus my attention on those groups that are off task or are struggling to work together and not spending enough time with the groups that seem to be having amazing discussions. I am thinking that we will hold an "online" lit circle by having each student blog about their role.

Marble Mania

Over the past few days our 5th graders have been working diligently on their marble science projects. Students had been learning about momentum, speed, velocity and distance. This project (all credit is given to Ms. M who came up with and taught the lesson) was intended to get students thinking about ways they could maximize a few of these things (distance, and speed) to come up with the slowest moving marble time.

Students were:
Paired with a partner
Given a piece of cardboard
and given plenty of supplies to be as creative as they wanted to be

The goal of the project was to create a maize or path for the marble on your piece of cardboard that would produce the slowest travel time for the marble to make it end to end. Students had to decide where to start their marble, what to use to get it moving, what obstacles to slow the marble down, etc. There are two projects I happened to capture on my computer and I have attached them here. I was really impressed with the outcome of everyone's project. The fastest time ended up being 13 seconds!

Teaching my units so far...

Has been a blast! I have learned a lot and have gotten much more comfortable each day in front of the classroom. One thing I learned from teaching my unit plans is that being prepared is crucial in the success of your lesson. I crashed and burned teaching a lesson because I was unprepared. This particular lesson was a math lesson, one that covered a topic I thought I knew a lot about, which I did, but one that I couldn't explain simply. I may understand something in my head, but sometimes it is hard for me to blurt that out in a way so that my students understand it. If I am prepared this lack of explanation and simplicity does not happen.

After the "crashed" lesson I went back the next day and tried to build on what I was unclear on the day before. I was more direct and clear on what I wanted to do and what I expected each student to be able to do and things went a lot smoother.

Students have been struggling with rounding too and its been frustrating to teach, but today I have finally reached everyone (or at least a majority I hope!) Each day we review the day before using warm-up questions and through discussion. I saw a few light bulbs clicking today and I think my instruction is getting clearer and more concise.

So far, I have learned that I need to make my objectives and goals for the lessons I teach clear and simple for everyone to understand. Never assume a student knows how to do something! (I taught my class how to use a dictionary the other day and it really made me happy when one student didn't know what a word meant during a language arts assignment and used the dictionary in the room to find the definition. Little victories make the days go by...)

The Reason I Haven't Posted...

in a while is because of my unit planning. This week I am starting to teach the two unit plans I have been working on for math and language arts. My math unit is all about whole numbers and decimals. I have incorporated several meaningful activities that I hope will engage the students. My math unit was much easier to plan because I had a book to follow for suggestions and lesson ideas.

My language arts unit was much harder to plan because I didn't have much to build from. I decided to spend my unit working on literature circles. Each day the class will learn and discuss a role they will have to fulfill later in class once they are broken into particular groups. I want students to model and practice each role before I send them to work on their own. The first day was much more time consuming than I anticipated and it may take me longer to get through each role than I had thought. I hope I am not over my head with this unit!

I will try my best to update my blog in the next few weeks as I continue to teach my units. I'll be especially busy this week because of parent teacher conferences and Halloween, what a week!

Classroom Set Up

I figured I would try my video camera out that I have on my computer to show all of you how my classroom is set up. This is a really quick video I took today from what I see during most of the day while I am at my desk. I really wanted to post this so I can get used to video taping with my computer and so I can figure out how to make my blog more technology friendly. Hope you all enjoy it!

Assessment Idea

I am using a notecard system to keep track of my students' progress during my math and literacy units. I am keeping these notecards together by using a binder ring and am focusing on 5 or so students each session. I am thinking this will be a good informal assessment that will be very useful come parent conference time. I am also thinking about using another set of notecards to assess students classroom behavio0r (also great for conferencing). Hopefully these informal assessments will be useful, we will see! Check back later to see if they work as good as they sound...

Good News From Mr. Kay

This is something I picked up from my graduate class and I think will be really useful in connecting with and getting to know your students. Every week or so I am choosing 6 students that I will write a postcard to. I try to pick students that I think did something really impressive but may not always get recognized by me or my CT. I mail the postcard home and hope that the students really take pride in what I wrote to them. These postcards serve as a great way to show your students and their parents that you care and are involved in making them better students and people. This activity also makes you find something good in every student in your room, not just the outstanding ones!

This is something that I came across in TE 401/402 last year and thought it was a great idea to use in my future classrooms. This year we are selecting a student each week to be the "Student of the Week". The student of the week has an opportunity to share their favorite subjects, sports, vacations, etc. A bulletin board is designated for the student to add pictures and their interests. Each week a student will have a chance to share an artifact they bring in. This is a great way to get to know your students better and to boost their confidence in the classroom. I will continue to use this for my teaching career. The first student of the week was a great success! She brought in a poster full of pictures of her family and friends. Today, she surprised everyone by bringing in her stand-up bass. She played a few songs and the class was amazed. Students look forward to sharing their favorite things with their classmates, its great for building a community within your classroom!

PD

Professional development, sounds serious, but really its just a day teachers get to learn new, innovative teaching techniques and familiarize themselves with the mechanics of the upcoming year, at least for my school.

Today I learned a lot about the intervention program our school has recently adopted, its called RTI or the Response to Intervention program. We researched and learned about ways to help students that are struggling. We also talked about the bugs in our grading/attendance system and discussed the technology requirements for our 5th graders. It was a long, strenuous day and the kids weren't even here! Though PD was all day it seemed like I got a lot of work done and learned a little bit more about how to be an effective teacher to all students.

I am also adopting something I learned last year from my CT in 4th grade called 'Student of the Week'. I created a bulletin dedicated to a particular student and they have the chance to share there favorite things with the class as well as pictures of their family and friends.

One final note, I taught my first full day this past Friday and was pleasantly surprised at how well behaved the students were and how smoothly the day went. One major hiccup in the day came early in the morning when two students were bickering about their desk space. One student said something inappropriate to the other. They notified me of the conversation and I had to think quickly on my feet. I've never dealt with such a situation so I called upon the knowledgeable sub in the room and she let me know what to do. I took both students in the hall explained that I wouldn't allow that inappropriate behavior in the classroom and that each student apologize to each other. I could tell the one student who was in trouble felt extremely bad about what he said and it seemed that this meeting gave closure to the problem and set the tone for the rest of the day. Good thing the sub was in there to help all day!

Week One thoughts...

It's noon on a beautiful Saturday for football and I am not at Spartan Stadium. I now know this year is surely going to be different than the past four years at MSU. Instead of tailgating, I'm brainstorming ideas for a related arts class I'm going to be teaching this coming week. Instead of getting up early to stand in line at a port-a-potty at the tennis courts I'm enjoying my day to sleep in and enjoy my weekend. It's a good feeling, maybe a sign I've grown up.

The real reason for this post is to talk about my first week as a student teacher, so I'll get to it . I couldn't be happier with my placement, CT and TE instructors, the first week went off without a hitch. I'll admit, I didn't get much sleep the night before school started, but after two days in the classroom I have no problem falling asleep by 10pm.

I have never really been in front of a room"leading" students by myself so this was one of the things I wanted to get out of the way early in the first day. I had two chances to introduce myself to my classes and soon found that I had nothing to worry about being in front of a class. I'll be in front of a class everyday for a long, long time to come and yes I will make mistakes (everyday too).

My other goal for the first week was to learn all of my students names. By Friday I had everyone in my homeroom down, but I still am struggling with the other 5th grade class that comes in our class. Week two goal: learn those other students names!

I know there a million other things I want to write about, but I don't want to get in too deep on my first post...and the Spartans are still on and tied with CMU! If I learned one thing this first week it is that the days of sleeping in, writing essays the night before they're due and bumming around all weekend are over...and that's a good thing and I am looking forward to the weeks to come.

Orientation

The first day of school is closer than ever and after going to orientation today I am really excited about the upcoming year. Orientation is a time where interns and their collaborating teachers (CT) meet to go over the year to come. We met our team leader, cluster leaders, a few TE 801/802 professors and our field instructors. We went over who to report to, what to expect from them and so on. It was nice to meet everyone and see other student teachers in my position. After introducitons we went over the bulk of our workload. While it doesn't seem like a lot now, this year is going to be a laboriuos one.

Orientation was good for my nerves and helped ease me into my new 'professional' life. I made sure to get phone numbers, emails and other information from my CT and other interns at orientation so that I would be prepared for anything when class starts. Less than two weeks away until school starts!

Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire

Rafe Esquith is a public school teacher in Los Angeles that pushes the limits of his students everyday and continues that mentality in his book Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire . This book is all about his teaching methods and ideas. I recommend this book to anyone hoping to inspire young people. Throughout my four years at MSU I have learned a lot from reading and lecture, but I have never learned so much from one book like I have from this one. I will definitely be using this book as a guide for future lesson plans, behavioral management strategies and inspiration. GET THIS book and read it whenever you have the chance it is worth it! This book should be required reading in any teacher education program.

Three Cups of Tea

Future teachers, current educators and those simply interested in reading an inspiring book, I recommend reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Relin. It is an excellent collection of stories of how one person can really make a difference in the world, especially in parts of the world that we are oblivious to. If you have free time I suggest giving this book a read as it will give you a new and more insightful perspective on Afghanistani, and Pakistani culture. Check it out at www.threecupsoftea.com

What to Expect...

Over the past (very short) four years I have learned a lot about various teaching techniques and tools to use as a teacher in the TE 150/250/301/401/402 classes, yet I still feel I am not prepared to "teach" a class. I feel that this blog (as it coincides with the internship year) will prepare me to become a better teacher and learner. I plan on using this website as an avenue to express my concerns as a first year student teacher and as a place to reflect and improve upon my behavior management techniques, confidence in front of the classroom and overall classroom awareness. Hopefully this site helps me and other students as well!

The Plan:
I plan on writing a blog each week (or so) about what is happening, what I've done during the week, what I've seen and anything else I find interesting about the classroom I am in this coming fall. I will answer and respond to anyone's questions about my blog throughout the week as best I can.