Week 16 December 10-12

This was my last week at my PDS. I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at my school co-teaching with my mentor teacher and running errands around the school. I was so sad when I had to leave on Wednesday. I didn’t know how much of an impact the students had had on me or how much of an impact I had on my students. I became very comfortable in my classroom and was able to take charge when I needed to. The experience I have had this past semester is invaluable to me. I was so lucky to be given the opportunity to spend so much time in the classroom and experience what being a real teacher is like, along with the many different things (good or bad) that occur in the classroom everyday.

This week I got the opportunity to sit in with our speech teacher and observe her testing a student for a learning disability. The child was a student in my class so it was really cool for me to watch him and see the ending results of his test. This particular student ended up being right in the middle of the level the teacher was screening him for. This meant that he was not eligible for more screening for a learning disability. My mentor teacher, the speech teacher, and I were both very disappointed with the results because this student has an obvious problem in reading.

Overall, I have learned so much from my mentor teacher and students in my classroom. I was very lucky to have a mentor teacher that gave me full control of the classroom and helped me plan lessons and helped me with anything else I may have needed. I am looking forward to next semester with my release days in which I will be acting as sub in the classroom. I believe this semester gave me the experience and confidence I need to have my own classroom one day. Getting up in front of the class and teaching is no longer scary for me and has become easier and easier. I used to be so nervous teaching, however, now it has become so normal for me. I am grateful for the teacher education program I am and the experience I have been given through the PDS.

Week 15 Dec 3-7, 2012

This was my final week of full time teaching and implementing my study. The biggest challenged I faced was planning lessons, teaching, and collecting data and analyzing it all at the same time! I was overwhelmed often with trying to balance everything. However, I did it! I found planning lessons becoming easier and easier as the week went by. Even though I only did full time teaching for 3 weeks at each of my placements, I do think it would have been even easier come week 6! This week was crazy with all different activities going on everyday! On Monday, we had a two-hour early dismissal, which means our schedule was all switched around and we didn’t have afternoon stations. On Tuesday, about an hour of our day was spent waiting for and attending a school wide puppet show that the students really enjoyed! On Thursday we had a filed trip to the CAC to see Aladdin. The field trip was so fun for the kids, but absolutely exhausting for me and the other teachers! On this day we only had afternoon reading and math stations. So, with all the crazy scheduling, I had to be really flexible with our time and had to make sure I planned activities that we needed to get done, like the spelling test and my vocabulary lessons.

I am starting the findings section of my research paper and it is so much work! I decided that I would look at each students activities according to week, and then look at the entire week and see if there were any improvements from the words the students missed on the pre-test on Monday and their change during the week. Second, I decided I would look at the individual activities with all the students and examine them for any change. Did they show improvements or not? Was there an activity where they showed success or one they did not? The final thing I decided I would do is look to see if there was a particular activity in which all students succeeded or did not succeed.  I am still going through this process. However, I did find one interesting thing. My below level male participant is able to show his understanding and knowledge of the words through his illustrations pretty easily. However, when it comes to showing his knowledge through writing or representing the words in a journal entry or sentence, he really struggles. The above level female student was very consistent with her vocabulary words. She either never missed a word on the pre-test, or she missed one. Her pictures and definitions were always correct. The only area I would say she needs improvements would be coming up with original words that mean the same thing as the vocabulary words. I believe she should be able to come up with creative words, but she needs more practice with words that mean the same thing.

Next week I will be at my PDS Monday through Wednesday. During this time I will be sitting in with the speech teacher/ IEP coordinator to observe some testing of a student in my class. I am really looking forward to this! I will also be scheduling some of my release days for next semester. I’m really going to miss my students. I have become so comfortable with teaching them and I know for sure now that I can be an effective teacher! I was terrified at the beginning of this semester, but I have really come to see that this is something I love doing and I will miss my students dearly!

Week 14 Novemeber 26-30, 2012

     I just finished my 2nd week of full time teaching. I was worried that
since the students had all last week off for Thanksgiving break that
they would be really crazy, but they weren’t! Monday and Tuesday went
really smooth, from there on out they were a little wild, but nothing
too bad! They really see me as their teacher and I like it! Mrs.
Wilson lets me do whatever I want to in the class and she really had
given me full control of the classroom. She buts in when she has
something she needs to say, but for the most part it is me and the
students. I really like that she trusts me so much and she lets me
handle the situations that arrive in the classroom even if she is
standing right there. I feel that I am getting a ton of experience
handling student situations. This includes things like arguments and
tattling. I have been able to handle a lot of situations that include
students crying. Even though it is really hard for me to sit there and
watch them cry and not hug them, I have to tell them are responsible
for themselves (if they forget a paper etc.), or to ignore those who
are making faces at them or saying things to them.

      Planning for the week has gotten so much easier! With the exception of
the stations the students go to twice a day Monday- Thursday, I have
developed a routine and that is one thing I have found that is so
important in the primary grades. When things are not done in a routine
fashion and students are surprised and don’t know what they are to do,
things get crazy! When I have my own classroom I will always have a
schedule posted, this not only helps the students keep track of what
subject or activity is coming up, but it also helps if a substitute is
in the classroom. I have also found that having all my materials ready
for the week ahead allows for a stress free week and I am not running
around the day of a lesson with my materials not ready. The first
thing I do when I get to school on Monday is look ahead and see if
there is anything I need to copy. I make the copies and then paper
clip everything together along with the lesson it goes with. I know in
the future this will be harder to do when I have a family and have to
plan absolutely everything (for example, Mrs. Wilson and I plan the
stations together)but for now, it is a good habit to get into because
it keeps me organized with school and teaching.

      This week I also conducted my science learning cycle. I did this same
unit with Mrs. Wilson’s second grade class last spring and the
difference between the two groups of students is amazing! Even though
I did the unit with her class in the spring when they were about to be
3rd graders and my students now are in the first half of 2nd grade, I
still see an extreme difference! I had my learning cycle ready to go,
but soon realized since the 2nd grade daily schedule changed, I didn’t
have as much time as I did last year. I also realized that the ability
level, motivation level, and maturity level was way different. I ended
up changing a bunch of individual activities or unsupervised small
group work to whole group work. I did this because I knew the students
I have now need more support than the students from last year. I had
to change the rubric for the final assessment to a much simpler form
because I changed the material to a different level. For example, we
didn’t go as in depth about the 3 different types of rocks as we did
last year. We did not complete the My Rock Journal because of time
constraints and because this was a small group activity the students
did together out on the playground and I wasn’t sure how the students
would handle this. They have a hard time getting along and are still
learning how to work together and deal with adversity when it comes to
arguments with other students. The small group activities we did
together encouraged them to share materials and ask each other
questions. This was a good way to get them working together, but it
was still supervised by Mrs. Wilson or myself.

      This week was also my 5th week of my research study. I decided how I
would go about analyzing my data and things I could and should be
looking for. Meaning, I found what I wanted each student to learn
during each activity. I decided to look at each student’s folder of
work. I then looked at their work week by week and tried to see if
there was a growth during the week. So, I looked at all the activities
for each week. Then, I looked at each individual activity for each
student. I looked at all 5 of the pre-tests, illustrations, foldables,
webs, and journal entries for each student and tried to see if there
was improvement from the first time they did the activity to the last
time they did the activity. I then decided that I would look at all
the students together and see if there was an activity that stuck out
to me that they all showed improvements on or did not. I plan on doing
this for each student, each week, and each activity. I will then begin
the findings section of my paper and write about what I found when I
analyzed each of the above. As I analyze the data, I am keep a
notebook page for each student and what I found when I looked at each
student’s work.

Week 13 November 12-16, 2012

     This week I started my first week of full time teaching. I have been doing most of teaching since I arrived back my home PDS, but everything this week was mine. There was no school on Tuesday due to it being Veteran’s day, so I had 4 days where all the instruction was mine. I have reflected on this fact before, but the students really look to me as one of their teachers. They always come to me with questions if it is dealing with a lesson I have taught them. If they go to my mentor teacher with questions, she tells them to ask me because I am their teacher. This tells me she really trusts me with her students. Many times during this week, my mentor teacher would need to run errands in the building and was out of the classroom. I handled the class very well I think and was able to teach the class without having her in the room to help out if I needed it. I feel this is helping prepare me to do my release days in the spring and also substitute. I have found it easier and easier to plan my lessons. My mentor teacher has been a huge help in offering suggestions and telling me how she would teach a particular lesson. She really lets me do whatever I want and I like having the freedom because I know some people have mentor teachers who don’t let them teach at all! Mrs. Wilson is more than willing to help me with anything, but she also lets me do a lot on my own, which is helping me become more comfortable in the classroom.

We finished our contract hours this week and many of my hours involves me leaving my PDS to co-teach in the feeder school for my PDS. My PDS only goes up to the third grade, so I feel like I have missed out on not being in a 4^th or 5^th grade class. I am also planning on co-teaching in an ELL class and doing some shadowing in a Special Education classroom that focuses on students with autism. Unfortunately, my home PDS does not offer these different classes on the level that the PDS I will be visiting does. With this being the case, I am hoping to learn about different services offered in different schools.  The other interns at my PDS and myself are going to design a book room at our school, which will include all the books the school shares in alphabetical order and put in order by grade level. We have also decided to present a PLC to our school’s staff. We are going to put on a math night and present our new findings to the staff. This will be a great experience for me and help me become more familiar with the process of setting up a PLC. I plan on using my resources from the PLC as one of the artifacts in my electronic portfolio.

            I finished my 4^th week of research and I feel a bit overwhelmed. Luckily, my mentor teacher is going to sit down with me when we return from Thanksgiving break (which is next week) and help me sort out my data and look for trends. One of my participants has gone out of the country for religious reasons and will not be back until December. I am still going to use her as a participant, however I will have to make note that she was gone for these reasons. This week’s groups of words all have to deal with being around water and the ocean. One of my participants commented that these words were easy and many of the other students caught onto the meaning of the word faster than they have the other words from previous weeks. This may be because all of these words have a very distinct connection compared to the other words. I look forward to sitting down with my mentor teacher and making sense of all my data. I don’t have a super large amount of data, I feel it will be the perfect amount to analyze, I am just not sure exactly how I should group things and what I should be looking for. After I talk with my mentor teacher, I have a meeting schedule with my teacher that is over seeing my research, so hopefully I can go to her and have her look at my ideas and see if I am heading in the right track. After Thanksgiving, I will be doing another week of full time teaching. I will be teaching my learning cycle again, which I am very excited about because I put a lot of work into creating it. I am a little scared to do it with this class because of their maturity level and the amount of time I will have each day for the different activities, but nonetheless I am still very excited! 

Week 12 November 5-9, 2012

I completed my 3^rd week of my action research, it is coming along nicely and I am getting enough data, however I am trying to figure out exactly how I should be analyzing it. I have enough data to look at, but I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I should go about looking at all the information I have. I have noticed the students have caught onto the routine I have them in with the different activities each week and they really seem to enjoy the activities where they are drawing.  Their writing is getting better too and they seem to be remembering the words better. An example of this would be me not having the write the vocabulary words on the board for their reference; they can recall the words from their memory.

This week there was also a sub in the class. Luckily, she was an intern at my PDS last year and did her intern semester with a first grade class, so she had many of my students before. This was helpful because she already knew them and they already knew her, she they had her respect and viewed her as an authority figure. She did a great job subbing. She let me do most of the teaching because I am beginning to full time teach now, but she would chime in every once in awhile and help me out if I was struggling. I have really started to get a hang of the routine we have in my classroom. It is so different than the middle school where there was time in between classes and I taught the same lesson two class periods in a row. Now, I feel like I am constantly having to do something in order to keep the students focused and engaged, it’s exhausting! Teaching the little kids is actually really fun and I’m enjoying it. I am able to write my lessons and review them the night before to make any changes and teach all day. My mentor teacher helps me with the stations because this is a lot of work for her, let alone me having to plan all the stations each week. So, we do this together which has really been nice.

One thing I have found with my 2^nd graders is how chatty they are! They talk and talk and even when I turn the lights off to try and calm them down, they still talk! It has sometimes turned into a power struggle where I am not raising my voice and asking certain students to calm down, but it is very hard. However, I have found one strategy that works fabulous with this class! I write the word recess on the board and I am able to erase letters throughout the week, if they lose all their letters, they lose their recess. They can earn letters back and this had been a real incentive for them to listen and follow directions and get the students around them to settle down as well.

I was only in school for 2 full days this week and a few hours on another day because it was Election Day and I left early on Thursday because I had my regional cross country meet out of town on Friday. My mentor teacher has been so helpful with helping me plan my lessons and filling in for me when I am unable to be there to complete my action research activity for the day. I plan on having Mrs. Wilson look at all my data and help me come up with some ideas about the students’ learning.

Next week will be even crazier because we have no school on Monday due to Veteran’s Day, leaving us 4 days of school and than Thanksgiving break! I hope the students aren’t too crazy. I am planning a lot of Thanksgiving activities; I am trying to stray away from the teacher manuals. My mentor teacher uses their topics but very rarely does she teacher her full lesson from those books. This is the type of teacher I want to be! I can’t wait to be a teacher who has all their materials set up from previous years and who has so many resources outside of the teacher’s manual! My mentor teacher has helped me to start developing into this type of teacher by always making me copies of her activities for my resources folder. 

Week 11 October 29- November 2, 2012

Woah! What a busy week! Although it was an extremely crazy few days, it only prepares me for my future in an elementary classroom. Monday went pretty smoothly, with the exception of the kids being a little rowdy because their Fall Festival was the next day. However, with the freak snow storm from hurricane Sandy, school was canceled Tuesday, and thus moving the Festival to Thursday. If Halloween, Fall Festival, and a snow day wasn't enough to make my head spin, Wednesday was a 2 hour delay and Mrs. Wilson had a sub come in! Luckily, the sub who came in has been a Suncrest numerous times and knows many of the students. She was very helpful in keeping the classroom routine in check, as much as it could be during this crazy week!

Thursday was our Fall Festival, and man was it exhausting! The students left school at 11:45 to change and eat lunch and then returned to school to complete games and stations. Mrs. Wilson and I made sure to keep Thursday morning the same as it always is, the kids were extra chatty, but we made sure to tell them that the party was a special treat and that in order to attend, they needed to be on their best behavior all morning! Luckily we had this talk with them before I was observed my school's liason. She said I did a very good job even though the math lesson i was originally going to teach had to be moved back because of the snow day and other events going on through the week. She says I have very good classroom control and that I am very enthusiastic with the students.

Thursday morning myself and the other interns meet with our coordinator and liason to discuss our contract hours for next semester. I was pretty nervous about this because I had no idea how I was going to reach 135 hours, but they helped us out so much and I am pretty close to having enough hours already! We are going to plan a family math night as part of our contract hours, so this will be a lout of work but I am really excited to see how we put everything together! The theme for my contract is life long learning. All of my contract hours are going to revolve around building my teaching knowledge.

This was the 2nd week of implementation of my research. I decided to skip Tuesday's activity because of the snow day and there was no way the students were going to stay focused on Wednesday to do 2 activities. Since election day is this coming Tuesday, I may just end up throwing my Tuesday data out because I will only have 4 out of the 6 weeks worth of data to look at. I am starting to think of ways I can organize my data and make sense of it, but I am having some trouble with this. Hopefully Mrs. Wilson can help me locate some patterns in the data I have collected so far. Next week, I meet with my research teachers to begin looking at my data, so this will be really helpful too.

Week 10 October 22-26, 2012

I just finished my 2^nd week at my PDS. Wow, time is really flying by, I only have 6 weeks left! This week at my PDS, I took notice of the collaboration among the teachers. Our PDS has new principal this year, and she has changed the whole schedule of the 2^nd grade. I thought since I had been with my mentor teacher before that this would be a piece of cake mainly because I already knew the schedule of the day. Well, everything has been changed!! We now have reading stations in the morning and math and more reading stations in the afternoon. This means there is over 5 new stations for math and reading each week! This is a ton of stuff to prepare for. Luckily, my mentor teacher said she would definitely help me when I start full time teaching because even she gets confused about the weird rotations we now have. There is only one other 2^nd grade classroom at my PDS. Since both 2^nd grade classrooms now have this new schedule, the two teachers really try to share resources and bounce ides off of one another, because let’s face it, there is a ton more planning to do now compared to the last time I was with the 2^nd grade! Collaboration makes their lives so much easier because they get to share their stations. I wouldn’t mind working with or even being a collaboration teacher. I worked with one at the middle school and my mentor teacher and I did a lot of co-teaching. The collaboration I see at the elementary school is different though, I se more of sharing resources than I do actual collaboration teachers, which I don’t think our school even has.

I also began my research study this week. It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be. I found it really difficult to fit in my vocabulary lessons for my research and all the other lessons we need to teach during the day. Luckily my mentor teacher is really flexible and allows me enough time to finish what I need to. I decided to look at 6 student’s work for my study. 3 girls, and 3 boys. I picked one boy and one girl each from the 3 reading groups; on level, above level, and below level. Unfortunately the girl student I picked from the at level reading group was absent from class during day 2 and day 3 of the this week’s vocabulary words. With this being the case, she missed the actual vocabulary lesson on Tuesday. I was out of town this week Thursday and Friday for a cross country meet, so my mentor teacher implemented my activities these days. I sent home day 1 and 2 activities with the student so she would still be able to complete them, I just may not use these in my data analysis and if I do I will make sure to note her activities were completed at home. I don’t have much to analyze yet because I have only conducted each activity one time and I am looking for comparisons among the activities.

One day this week we had a sub. This sub was no help at me all and it makes me feel bad for the students when there is a sub because their whole day is completely messed up. Even the students told my mentor teacher that the sub didn’t do anything all day. I ended up teaching the whole day, which was fine because I need and enjoy the experience, but the students definitely tried to see how far they could push my buttons. They were so chatty all day and it was really hard for me to get them to calm down. Turing the lights off didn’t work, giving them laps to walk at recess didn’t work, giving them slips didn’t work. Nothing. This is something I am going to talk to my mentor teacher about because it was very frustrating for me as a new teacher. My mentor teacher has told me many times that that class is very immature for 2^nd graders, and I definitely saw that when I was teaching the whole day. I had one student who cried 4 times throughout the day. One time because the gym teacher didn’t let the boys come into the building first. It was a very tiring day and at the end of the day I questioned if this was something I wanted to do all my life. I told myself that next year I will have my own classroom and I will be seen as the real teacher and hopefully my students will find more respect for me. The next day at school my mentor teacher told me that she noticed a huge difference with how the students approached me. She said she saw them coming to me instead of her and asking for my self and guidance. She said this was because I was the boss yesterday and they were starting to look at me like they look at her. This made me feel really good and that I actually did teach and make an impact on the students the day before. My mentor teacher also told me that the principal at our school complimented me on what a great a job I did with the students while Mrs. Wilson was away, so this was really good news!

Next week I begin week two of my research study and start teaching more math and reading, which I am really excited about. All my math lessons this week went very well and I am definitely more confident teaching the younger students now than I was when I was teaching the 2^nd grade last Spring!