Monday, November 28, 2016
What an incredible couple of weeks!
These past few weeks have been more than I could have imagined. The classroom I have been placed is in great. My CT has me and my other classmate very involved. There are 21 students in this Kindergarten classroom. The first 3 hours of the day is spent on the morning meeting, then the remainder of the three hours is spent working on language arts. My CT does a wonderful job breaking up the lesson into mini lessons, station time, and motor breaks. This keeps the students attention much longer, as well as then being able to spend more one on one time with them for guided reading, hand writing, assessments, and such. One thing that my CT also does to keep their attention is having students that aren't able to listen go take a break in a chair instead of sitting on the rug, then she also has secret signals to bring them back to the lesson. During morning meeting she does all 5, but she repeats all of the games and greetings. During sharing she either has the children whip share where they all share one thing, or she has three in one day share either how they feel or something exciting they want to share. During her mini lessons she normally reads a book, goes over the vocabulary words and introduces the main lesson for that week. In stations while the CT is at a table working on guided reading with different tables, I am able to go around to different tables and see how the children are doing and see if they need any help. The stations have many different levels of difficulty and they are able to choose from whichever they want, though they all have their favorites. Other days during station time I have been able to do some work for my CT. I have taken each student into the hall and worked on assessing their letter sound accuracy, and rhyming words, counting to 50, and one day interviewed them about their favorite things in school. The children are all very involved, and well behaved. They listen to me and my classmate as well as any other teacher that comes around. They love the help and love learning new things. I have learned to love working with this age group, because they are all so excited to learn and still so kind to one another.
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It never seems to stop how much appreciation I have for kindergarten teachers. They just are able to manage everything perfectly without missing a beat. I wish I would be able to do this instantly. I know this comes with time, though! Have you been a teacher for a day to see how it is like to run the classroom? If you have, what was your biggest challenge?
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I love hearing how involved your kids are with school. My second graders are the same way. They can get a little restless at times, but GoNoodle seems to help out great with that! My CT also has it where they understand if she puffs out her cheeks that means "bubble in your mouth," which stands for we have to be quiet. What are some of the secret signals and what they mean?
I feel the same exact way! Even though I have not been able to teach for one entire day or morning, one of the days we had a sub. While the sub was there me and my classmate piped in and did half of the work because we knew how the teacher/students day works. It felt so wonderful to really jump in and get a feel of what being a teacher really is instead of sitting on the sidelines watching. It is always good to learn and I am learning all the time from her, but it's just different doing it yourself. To answer your other question my biggest challenge was trying to stay on topic when someone brings it off topic or when others are acting out. With other help in the room it isn't so bad, but I know it can't always be full of people helping the teacher there just isn't enough people to go around at a lot of schools.
DeleteYes I hear of many teachers including GoNoodle into their daily routines, if not it can be one of their gotoos for when they have extra time or the kids are extra restless. Some of my CTs secret signals are with her two fingers crossed means sit criss cross apple sauce, when she puts her hands apart and starts to move them together that is the timer, and others like that. It is ones where instead of having to repeat herself nonstop she finds a signal to make transitions more smoothly or still able to keep with the lesson without any disruptions.