Learning Goals

So far this semester I have been working on my specific learning goals. Things have been going pretty good with my class, however I still find myself working on my goal of becoming more comfortable in the classroom and learning how to manage a class full of students better. One learning goal that I have had a lot of progress on is developing lesson plans that incorporate art projects in an affective way. I did a visual arts lesson with my class. I read them a story with the cover of book hidden with paper. After the story, the students were to draw a cover to the story, using what they remembered from the story to develop their cover a title for the story. While many students were excited about the lesson I had a few students who didn't even try the project despite my host teacher asking them to corporate. Many of the students enjoyed this lesson because it was something different from their typical worksheets and workbooks. I am working more towards this goal in the hopes of engaging the students who seemed lost during my first art lesson. My second art lesson the students will be creating puppets to a story they will read in class the day before.

Reflecting On Our Blogs

After reading my original posting from last Fall (2010) about the potential of using a blog to reflect on my experiences in my PDS and the Five-Year Program, I have come to understand why keeping a blog will be a useful tool in the near future when I am a full time teacher. It will allow me to keep track of my ideas and share my ideas and problems with other teachers in the hopes of receiving advice as well as sharing my advice with others. I think the most effective thing a blog can do for reflection on practice is that it allows us to receive feedback from other people. I think the blogs we have created can be more useful if the whole Benedum Program used it and all our assignments were posted on our blog.

I think it is important to hear about what our classmates are doing in their PDS’s because we are all at different schools with different students, it is nice to see how the schools around our area are different, even though they are only a few miles away from each other. Being able to share my blog with my seminar facilitator and PDS faculty would allow me to address issues and ideas that I have in an easy way. I think it would be a good idea to have us write about a certain issue we have come across in our PDS and then get the opinions of the people who have access to our blogs. I would find it useful to use our blogs to talk about lessons we have taught, this way we can share our ideas with our peers. Not only can we share information and ideas with our peers, but we can also reflect on what we do ourselves. Having all our reflections conveniently located in one spot instead of on paper would help with organization. We would be able to keep our reflections all in one area and go to specific reflections on lessons before we teach that lesson again.

Some things that I think would be useful involving our blog would be to post actual lessons we have done, along with our reflection on the lesson. Doing this would allow our partners, seminar facilitator, and PDS faculty to see our ideas and what we think about our lessons. I also think it would be cool if we had access to the blogs of everyone in our class that way we can read other people’s blog and we aren’t so limited. It would be nice to have others read our ideas and have them comment on them too. I think for our blog to be most effective it needs to be used more throughout the semester.

Question: What is your favorite thing about having a blog for the Benedum Program?

My Learning Goals and Practicum Plan

- One of my learning goals is to do a tutor activity dealing with reading and letters. I am specializing in English so I really wanted to see how students react to reading and letters. Pre-k kids aren't exactly open to the idea of sitting down and writing their letters out. I knew since I am with a pre-k class this semester that doing an activity with reading would be hard, but actually just today I got to do an activity with letters. In this activity I worked with 3 students who are struggling with letter recognition. I found it interesting that these students could spell and write their name correctly in order. However, when I asked them to name the same letters in their name just in a different order, it was an impossible task for them. I also got to see how pre-k students handle not wanting to do something you ask them to. They just sit and stair at you.
- I haven't made a lot of changes to my plan so far, just changing some dates around. I am at my PDS school on a Monday and so far there have been two days where I wasn't able to go for a holiday and an ISE day. I have made pretty good progress on my plan and only have a few activities that I need to complete before the semester ends. In all honesty, I haven't looked at my plan once, this is mainly because I write everything down in my planner, when it's due and when I plan on doing it. So making my plan was really just me taking my planner and putting it in a different format that doesn't really work for me. It was a good idea in the sense that it really made me think about the whole semester and when I needed to have things done by. My progress with my plan overall has been good, I just don't look at it very often since I already have stuff written down in my planner.

Digital Storytelling

Some experiences from my PDS that I may consider using in my digital story would be the experiences I have had with the students and reading. I think reading is one of, if not the most important subjects in school. I worked with the students at my PDS a lot with reading and it was interesting seeing all the different levels of reading. Some ideas from my PDS experiences that I can consider including in my digital story would be how every few weeks in my PDS classroom, my mentor teacher picks a different subject. For example, for the next few weeks my PDS class is working on fairy tales. There are castles set up all around the room, the students have made crowns to wear, and during circle time, the teacher reads a different fairy tale. I could incorporate the weekly/ monthly lessons with the read aloud time and make a digital story about the students' lessons on fairy tales. 

Some stories from my PDS that would be interesting to listen to would be how the students react to their reading levels. I worked with a lower elementary grade last semester where the students were just beginning to read full books on their own. Some students were so far ahead of other students it was amazing to me. Some students could read full beginning chapter books, and others were struggling so much with the books that had three words on a page. I found it frustrating when I was working with these students that one student would take 2 minutes to read a book, and others I would sit there and help them sound out every word until they got it. Interesting events and details make a good story. 

Using different multimedia to enhance telling a story to a listener is a great idea because the listener can actually see what is going on. They can picture it for themselves, and it also may have more on an impact on the listener if they can see what you see.  

Reflecting on Tutor Activities

Prompt: Reflect on your Tutor Activity Forms and/or other activities you've engaged in with the students at your PDS. What have you learned from the relationship you've built with some of the students in your classroom (learning styles, student engagement, teaching strategies that were successful, relating to students' experiences such as previous success in school, parental support?)

When I look back at my Tutor Activity Forms from this semester, I have really come to realize that teaching is not an easy thing. I did an activity with several students who were struggle with the concept of a number grid. I just couldn't understand how they didn't see that it started with 1 and went to 100. It was frustrating at times, but then I would just sit back and remember that when I was in the first grade I also struggled with math, and maybe if someone at my school would have give me extra help and had stated patient with me, I might not have had such a hard time. Remembering this, I have started to be more patient with the students and I just remind myself that if I can be the one person during their day that shows them I care, then maybe they will have a better attitude towards math and other subjects in school.
There is one student at my PDS who is very conscious about school work, and this student is in the second grade. One day he came to school very upset because he forgot to do a homework assignment. He was absolutely terrified that he was going to to get expelled, and was so upset his mother came into school to sort out the problem. His mother had me tell him that his teacher is very nice and he was not going to get expelled. When I told him this, he gave me a hug. After that day, he asks me for help all the time and I can tell that he really trusts me.
With other students at my PDS, I have learned that some students are very independent and can handle themselves in the classroom with very little instruction and help to complete activities. With others, this is not the case. There are students in my PDS classroom that need told how to do an assignment 3 or 4 times and then they understand. I have learned that giving directions once will not satisfy every student. The thing I have learned the most is that I need to make sure every student is given attention during the school day.

Question: Where there any students in your classroom that you built a relationship with?

Blogging Possibilties

Think about blogs you've participated in or like to read regularly.  What is it about these blogs that you find interesting/engaging/informative?  Then, think about how you might use a blog as a teacher and as a preservice teacher in the Benedum Collaborative Five-Year Teacher Education Program.   In your first posting, describe how you envision a blog supporting your experiences.  What kinds of things can you imagine writing about?  Please include as many possibilities as you can.

The have used two blog type programs. One is Facebook and the other is a blog that my cross country and track coach have set up for us. I like using Facebook for keeping in touch in my friends that have gone to college out of state. Using Facebook allows us to talk to each other. The blog for our cross country team is mostly used for our schedule and keeping us up to date on our workouts and trips. I like using these blogs for keep up with my schedule.

I could use a blog as a teacher and as a preservice techer in the Bendedum Collarboratie Five-Year Teacher Education Program by posting what I have done in my classes and what issues I might have come across. Hopefully people reading my blog would have advice on what I should do. I can also use it to read other people's blogs and see what they have been doing in their schools.

Things I can imagine writing about would be my experinence in the classroom, activites I did with my class, my wonderings, and to ask questions to people who are reading my blog. If I write about the activites I did with my class this could give other teachers ideas for teaching their lessons. Also, if I keep track of my wonderings and the other questions I have just in general  about teaching, then other teachers can comment on them and give me advice. I can also give others advice as well.