Final Blog Entry

To end this blog, this semester has been a great learning experience for me. I feel like I have gained information and actual practice that I will be able to take into the classroom when I begin to teach. My field teacher couldn't have been any better, I am grateful for the experience I had to work with her and her class. Her students will remain in my memory for years to come. I enjoyed being able to actually teach a lesson in a real classroom for the first time. Seeing the kids respond to what I was teaching them, particularly during my final lesson on division, cemented for me that I want to be a teacher. Although I am aware that I have so much more to learn, I feel so much more confident about entering a classroom as a professional than I did at the beginning of the semester. I hope everyone enjoyed their semester as much as I did and has a safe and fun summer!

My Final Lesson!

On April 15, 2009, I had the opportunity to introduce the topic of division to a second grade math class. My cooperating teacher, Mrs. Bullock, gave me the book “Divide and Ride” to use in my lesson plan, but other than that, did not give me a lot of guidance as far as the lesson structure was to go. This was exciting, but scary at the same time, since I would be giving the students their first glimpse of a skill they will use their whole lives.
Since the book that I would be using was about friends going to an amusement park, I prepared magnetic children to use on the whiteboard, and cutouts similar to the rides in the book. While reading the book, I paused at certain intervals in order to have a volunteer come to the board and move the correct number of children onto the ride.
After the book, I passed out manipulatives to the children and had them divide up their groups based on the problems that I wrote on the board. They did a great job with this. After several practice problems, I had the students come up with problems to write on the board for their classmates to try with the manipulatives.
When getting my lesson plan approved, Dr. Langston had told me to take out the problems that I was using for examples that included remainders, because she thought that it would be too difficult for the students. I did this during my lesson, however, we had to discuss remainders during the portion where I allowed the students to make their own problems because on the problem10/6 it came up. I therefore improvised and did several other examples with remainders so that the students would be able to have a few other examples to gather knowledge.
I think this lesson went very well. I was really surprised at how quickly the students seemed to be catching on to the concept of division, and I wondered if I had been taught using physical examples if I would have found it easier. The children seemed engaged the entire time and were eager to answer my questions. At the end of the lesson, to sum up, I asked the students to raise their hands and tell me what they learned about division that they didn’t know before. They came up with some great responses that really showed me they had “gotten it!”
After my lesson, my teacher told me that the lesson had been perfect for introducing a difficult concept, and she said she loves having practicum students because their lessons always help her remember the things she should be doing. I thought this was a pretty big complement and I was flattered and very excited to hear that.

Children and Families in Poverty

The video we watched in class today was an example of the kind of parent that we could very well encounter in our years teaching. Tammy was trapped in a cycle of poverty that she was thrust into by her parents years before she had any control over her circumstances. I have seen the video before, and it goes into further detail about how difficult it is for people in poverty to break the poverty cycle and make a better life for their children. Even though parents stuck in that sort of situation have the best intentions for their children's lives, our society is set up in such a way that makes upward mobility difficult, despite the 'reachability' of the so-called "American Dream."

What was very encouraging to me was that her son, Matt, had big, and yet realistic dreams. He had obviously been shown a lot of support in school, because he didn't seem to have been given a lot of academic support at home. This was evident in the drawer full of awards that he showed us. He clearly tried to do well in school and planned on going to a local college to get an education and move up from his current surroundings.

One of my best friends from home grew up in a similar situation to Matt. Her father abandoned her family when she was young and her mother works as a dishwasher at Pizza Hut. Her mother struggles to make ends meet for her family of four, but is consistently behind on her bills and has a very difficult time even putting food on the table. Because of her difficulty to provide even the most basic needs for her family, my friend's mom had little time to devote to her academic success, however, in my friend "Jenna's" educational career she had some great teachers that recognized her potential for great things and encouraged her and stood behind her, making her do things that even she did not know she was capable of.

These teachers are responsible for her getting a nearly full scholarship to the College of Charleston where she is majoring in Psychology, and hopes to one day be involved in social work. Jenna is proof that teachers can make such a big difference in the lives of children who live in poverty.

I think it is very important for us to remember, however, that just because a child is poor, that doesn't mean that their parents don't care about him or her. I was a little disturbed by one of the bullets on our PowerPoint in class that said "help them learn how to provide a warm and affectionate environment." Being poor doesn't make someone a less-capable or less loving parent than someone who has greater resources, and I think it is important for us to remember that we never know the COMPLETE circumstances surrounding a child's situation, and we should be very careful to make judgements when we don't know the full story.

Families

Children's families have a major impact on their learning styles, prior learning, personalities, and abilities when they enter a classroom. Every child is unique and so is every family, so the children in an individual classroom will have come from very different backgrounds, which can make creating lessons that will engage all students difficult, at times.

I feel that the teacher must have interactions with each child's family in order to gain perspective on why a child acts the way he or she does. When meeting a student's parents, teachers are able to see where the child came from and what kind of attitude his or her parents have towards schooling and other aspects of the child's life.

When my teacher does "thumbs up, thumbs down" with her students each day, most of them share something about their families, and I am always surprised when she responds to their statements because she is almost always already aware of the situation. One student in the class said that her mother had been really sick the night before, and the teacher commented on the fact that her mom's new baby would be coming soon and she would feel better soon. Every week I get a new example of how she is involved and engaged in the students' lives and families.

I know that it has taken her many years of teaching to develop these kinds of relationships, but I hope that, since I have had it modeled for me so early, that I will be able to do the same thing she does with my students' families quickly after beginning to teach.

Long Range Plan

I am glad we have had the opportunities to write our own long range plans and talk about them with our classmates. The format we have been using seems like it will be helpful to us in the future when planning lessons. I'm not sure exactly how much they are going to be used when we actually get out into the field, though, and I would like to know what everyone else's field teachers have told them about this.
When Shannon and I asked to see our teacher's long range plan, she thought it was kind of funny, I think. She said that her principal doesn't make them keep them, as long as they are able to produce, when asked, what they are doing on a given day. She keeps hers more in a calendar format in her grade book, and she showed us that she always writes in pencil so that she can change it if the students aren't grasping a concept or if the days get disrupted for some other reason.
One thing that concerns me about long range plans, if they are used by teachers "religiously" is that if the students aren't getting something, you may not be able to spend too much time explaining it, or you will push everything else back until you simply run out of time. To remedy this in my plan, I planned three days for my final project to sum up the unit, and would use this time as flexible time to reteach anything that the students weren't understaning.
I think that, regardless of whether we will be required to do something this formal in our future careers, this project has been a positive learning experience for me.

Second Lesson

Last Wednesday, Shannon and I taught our second lesson. I was very excited to get to teach about dragonflies, and I thought that the activities that we prepared would be fun and engaging for the students. I was a little nervous, however, because Dr. Mayer was going to be observing us teaching. The main thing that I was trying to work on personally in this lesson was slowing down, because in my first lesson I talked WAY too fast and wound up completing my lesson more quickly than I needed to.

During our lesson, the kids seemed really engaged and seem to enjoy it. We knew that they had been studying lots of different kinds of insects in their science class, so we tried to tie into what they already knew and build upon that. During Shannon's part of the lesson, she read them a story about dragonflies and then led them in a discussion about the life cycle of dragonflies. During my portion, I talked with them about dragonflies' body parts and then had them create their own dragonflies out of play-dough. They loved the activity, and it was so much fun to watch them create their little insects!

When I conferenced with Dr. Mayer on Friday, she complimented our lesson and told me that we kept the students engaged the entire time with our frequent questioning. She also said that she liked the activities we chose. One thing she suggested for me to do differently next time was to model the play-dough creations for the students ahead of time, because one child in the class seemed a little confused about what he was expected to do, however I was able to remedy that by giving him a little bit of individual attention.

Something I found amusing that I wanted to include for everyone's entertainment: When Shannon was reading the book in the car that morning, (since I had checked it out from the library, she hadn't seen it yet) she noticed a page discussing the dragonflies having intercourse. The page went something like, "hello dancing dragonflies...your dance sparks new life..." and after laughing for a good five minutes, we decided to tape the pages together so that we wouldn't have to answer any uncomfortable questions. We still aren't sure what the appropriate age to read something like this would be. Any suggestions?

Assessment

How does your co-operative teacher use assessment?
What are your experiences this semester with assessment in the field?

Questions:
-What assessments are used?
-How frequently are students assessed?
-How are the results used?

My field teacher uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to discover where her children are developmentally. In reading classes, she uses the tests provided in the curriculum, which I sometimes find to be a little bit difficult for the level at which the children are operating. For math, she provides manipulatives for each student to represent the problems they are doing and then walks around and discusses each child's answer with them as they finish.

She uses this information to plan for future lessons and to slow down in her teaching approach, if necessary. Since she has the lower groups level-wise for both her reading and math classes, she tries very hard to take cues from what they are learning in order to structure her lessons.

I think that the use of variety in her classroom helps each student succeed, since if a child doesn't do well with one sort of assessment, she has the opportunity to observe them in a different form of assessment, and she can tell that perhaps it isn't that the student doesn't know what he or she is doing, just that they didn't understand the method of the assessment.