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!