Week Three

 

01.30.12       Day 10

       Monday, oh Monday, today was a case of the Monday’s for myself and a few students. We had CRT prep for most of the day. It’s great experience to see what the test will be like, but my goodness it is draining. I felt so bad for the students. Today there was about three hours of math practice, but it was needed. I am still doing morning math and a few other small activities. Mary and I decided on a fun math/art project for me to teach next week. I am excited for that and a chance to do something fun with the kids. After school I attended a meeting on test prep strategies to use in the classroom. It was mostly review of what Mary has already been doing (I really do have a master teacher to work with). There were a few good strategies I took away, such as, covering the answers on the math section and working through the whole problem before looking at the answers. Students tend to estimate and guess. Long day but tomorrow is a new day.

01.31.12       Day 11

        I fell off the wagon and forgot to journal today. Oops. I needed a night to turn my brain off and watch a movie.

02.01.12       Day 12

Things were good today. It’s funny, we do so much during the day, nonstop, that when I sit down to write about it my I can’t remember as much as I had wanted. The big accomplishment for today was teaching/reviewing ‘right there’ answers in a text. In the beginning there was some fumbling with trying to work the Smartboard, deciding how to word my question, pick a student to answer, and manage/engage the others. Whew, it’s a lot to do at once and it will take some fumbling and practice until I get it right. That is what I need to remember and not beat myself up about. Each time is a new and different experience that I can gain something from. Be it ‘yeah, that was a great lesson. Love it, the kids love it, keep that one in my pocket’ or ‘it was awful and should be burned as soon as possible’. Transitions between activities are getting easier as well. Today, Mary was out of the room longer than expected and I had to decide whether to continue our activity or move on to the next lesson. We moved on and started the next subject. Things moved fairly smooth, it’s ok to get some jitters and wiggles/noise out, and started up quickly. Yay! I need to make a running list of good ideas so I can type them up when I get home. By 7 pm things are getting foggy.

02.02.12       Day 13

Let’s see, things are going well leading morning math. The students are struggling with common factors and knowing what to look for. We’ve been modeling tree diagrams and number lines. During small reading groups the students are still writing constructed responses. Today we scanned their writings in and graded them. It was great to talk about each others writing and discuss strengths and weaknesses. I feel like they are really starting to get what we are looking for for CRT writing. For math we used a great website called that quiz, to practice measuring angles. The students had to get 90% proficient before moving on. Most were able to get the concept quickly. There were a few students who needed a little extra help. We came up with questions to ask ourselves before measuring. These were; is the angle greater than, less than, or equal to 90 degrees. For others I used scaffolding by saying acute, obtuse, and right angles. We then put our protractors over the angles and looked at our two numbers and decided if we used the bigger or smaller number based on whether or angles was acute or obtuse. After math Mary had to leave for an appointment, so I had the class for about thirty minutes. We did a CPS clicker quiz on the story we read the day before. It was good for me to work with the kids one-on-one and it went better than I had anticipated. Things got a little hectic right before lunch. I learned it’s sometimes better to end earlier and be organized than to rush it and have frantic students. In the afternoon we build geodesic domes for the 100^th day of school. It was a really cool activity. It took the whole afternoon, which surprised me. 4^th graders still are working on motor skills like rolling and taping. All our domes turned out great! 

02.03.12       Day 14

Nothing out of the ordinary today. Mary lead most of the lessons while I assisted students. We had our weekly class meeting before lunch because I had to leave early today. It was interesting to hear what is concerning the kids. Mostly we have problems with fairness during games at recess and curse words being said.