11th day in the classroom

On Thursday January 24th I had my 11th day in the classroom.  When I showed up at 1:30 in Mrs. Almond's class, she had a substitute teacher.  The substitute teacher said that she didn't have anything for me to do, so I headed on down to Mrs. Greenfield's classroom.  They were not there, so I looked around and found them in the library.  They got to pick out books for silent reading and then they got to take them home.  Back in the classroom, Mrs. Greenfield had the students get out their squiggle word journals.  They turned to a page and found a squiggly line.  They had to make the line into a picture and color it.  After they finished their picture, they had to write two complete sentences.  Then the best part was that she had each student come to the front of the class and show their picture and then read their sentence to the class.  It was fun seeing how creative the students were.  They all had such different ideas about what they could make out of the same squiggle.  Mrs. Greenfield looked at all of their sentences and had them fix different mistakes like capitalizations, spelling, and punctuation marks.  This assignment took a good amount of time, so when they were all finally done sharing it was time to start getting ready to go.  Mrs. Greenfield is such a fun teacher, I love watching how she interacts and plays with her students.  One of the kids favorite things that she does is when she passes out their take home folders she stands in one spot and yells out a kids name and then tosses his folder to him or her and they try to catch it.  She constantly yells, "heads up".  While she is handing out folders, she always has the student of the day pick some helpers and they pass out all the students work to put in their take home folders.  It is a really fun time of day for the kids.
After all the craziness, all the students sit at the rug and she reads to them until its time to go.  During reading time at the end of the day the student of the day gets to pick some friends to help clean up the floor.  They crawl under the desks and pick up little pieces of trash.  Something about this makes it really special so they love cleaning.  When they are done, the student of the day always gets to sit by Mrs. Greenfield in a special chair.  

Tenth day in the classroom

On Thursday, Jan 17th I went to Mrs. Almonds classroom at 1:30, they were working on an art project when I got there.  Mrs. Almond had one more student to test so she asked me to stay with the kids during their indoor recess and then to get them started in science.  Indoor recess was the same as always.  The kids play games and goof off, sometimes they get a little too active for indoor recess and I have to help them find something to do.  Some of them like to play with Bubber which is like play dough that never dries out.  It is really fun, I need to remember about Bubber for my classroom someday.

At 2:00 I had the students clean up and then log the weather in their weather journals.  I have decided that I like smart boards, but they are a little unpredictable.  It seems like so many of the teachers have issues with them?

For science Mrs. Almond put a movie in and all I had to do was push play.  We had some technical difficulties with the smart board of course.  But eventually I got it started  and the kids took notes.  Mrs. Almond came in right before it was over and I headed to Mrs. Greenfields at 2:30.

In Mrs. Greenfield's class the students were working on phonics when I came in and then they did their scholastic books reading.  They have a great program online that Mrs. Greenfield pays for.  Each student gets a little scholastic pamphlet each week and it has some online games and reading.  The whole class reads them together and the students get so excited every time she pulls it out.  Another thing I need to remember for some day down the road.

To end the day Mrs. Greenfield passed out folders and take home work.  Then the students sat on the rug and she read to them until 3:30.

Teachers deserve so much more praise than they get.  They put in so much time and energy to be amazing!

Nineth Day in the Classroom

Today was a fun day in Mrs. Almond's class.  I got there at 1:30 and Mrs. Almond told me that she was going to teach me how to test the students reading levels and then I would teach science class for her while she finished testing students reading levels, i was really nervous, but excited.  It was interesting to see how reading level testing is done.  After that I stayed with the students while they had an indoor recess because it is very windy and cold weather outside today.  At 2:15 I had the students clean up and then I taught the students about weather.  We had a group reading paper about weather that we all read together.  We read and talked about meteorologists and how they study the weather.  We learned about the different types of clouds and we discussed how tornadoes are formed.  The students had fun talking about the tornado that Salt Lake had in August 1999.  Mrs. Almond came back into the classroom at 2:30 and I headed over to Mrs. Greenfield's class.

When I got to Mrs. Greenfield's class, they were learning about maps and compasses.  Mrs. G. put a compass on each students desk so they could see that the arrow always points north.  She put an N on the North wall and then an S on the south wall.  An E on the east wall, and a W on the west wall.  The students were able to understand which direction north, south, east, and west were in the classroom.  They located the compass rose on the maps and learned that north is always pointing up on a map.  After learning about compasses and maps, Mrs. G. had me pass out the scholastic readers and the students read about ice caves and snow leopards.  After scholastic reading, they sat on the rug and Mrs. G. read The Magic Finger by Ronald Dahl.  At 3:30, the students were excused to go home.

I love helping in the classrooms and learning different skills and tools that will help me as a teacher someday.