First Year surprises

One blog that I found talked about how some teachers are teaching just for the paycheck while others are teaching for the students and putting 100% of their time and effort into thier students and thier classroom.

I have seen both ends of the spectrum that Mr. Rugen is talking about throughout my educational lifetime. I think that it is interesting the wide range of people who are in the same profession, especially one that focuses on professional development and the continuous cycle of learning that occurs in a lifetime. I have been lucky to work with a CT who puts 100% into her classroom and her students, I am able to see first hand the importance of the learning cycle once we have a contract. As I have talked about a lot in class, my CT just completed the GLAD training this summer and we are working on implementing as many strategies as possible into our units. Seeing how she has learned a new approach to teaching, changing her whole flow of the year that she is use to, and seeing how it is having a positive effective on the students make me want to be a teacher who also puts 100% into my future students and classroom once I get a contracted job.

If you would like to read Mr. Rugen's blog the URL is: http://yearoneteacher.blogspot.com/

Now that you are nearing the end of your first quarter of your internship, what has been your biggest surprise about being in the classroom and working with students?"

I am writing this with a hesitation that I am beginning to sound like a broken record, sorry in advance if you are feeling the same as me. After being in the classroom for three months now the biggest thing that I have shocked myself in is at the speed that I have picked up Spanish. Not just a conversational level , but I have successfully completed my UbD mini-unit (along with Teresa, yeah to you too!) and delivered the whole thing in Spanish. I no longer fear having to interact with the students because of the language barrier, in fact I am now able to take their jokes and laughs (usually at me instead of with me) in regards to my learning curve of Spanish. This experience has been invaluable to me and for my professional career, I now have a level of empathy with my future students and families of what it is like to be a language learner and have to rely on your limited skills to survive in a different atmosphere where your first language is one that is not widely used. I believe that this is the most profound thing that I will learn from my experience at West View, this is something that will help me no matter the city or path that my career will take me.

I am also surprised on a daily bases on how smart my first graders all are. During the summer I thought about what I would be teaching in the first grade classroom, I pictured learning and focusing on a letter of the day, how to form letters and numbers and have a more directed focus on the relationship between what was written and what it says or does. I was shocked (and slightly sad because I knew that I would need the review as much if not more than the students) that we never reviewed the alphabet or numbers in the first few weeks. Every child came into the first grade able to read and many already reading complicated picture books. We are now working with a sentence patterning chart, where each table group wrote a sentence about plants and as a class we are working through the editing process. These students amaze me on a daily bases with their independence and dedication to their educational future!

UbD lesson reflection

1. Learning target: list the short term learning target/objective of the lesson, along with a short description of the learning experiences section of your lesson plan.
The third lesson to my first graders on our family unit my short term objective was:
1. Students will know a variety of activities that families do together.
2. Students will be able to apply vocabulary skills to interact with peers, lectures, and activities.
For the lesson I reviewed the vocabulary that Miss Doherty taught them the day before as well as introduced the three new vocabulary words that we would be using that day through a pictorial. The class then sang a song about the different jobs that are in a family, back on the carpet I read them a book that showed different activities that families do together. The students activity for the day was to talk with their bilingual buddy and decide what activity they would like to illustrate that a family does together and write a sentence explaining the sentence.

(2) Evidence: describe what students did or said to let you know whether you were successful in meeting this goal (what evidence led you to this conclusion?)
The students were successful in understanding that different families do different activities together. The students were able to brainstorm a list as a class of different activities that their families did, then transferred their ideas to their paper where they chose one to illustrate what a possible activity a family could do together. The part that I saw the students having trouble with was the vocabulary for the day. One of our words was "quehaceres" which in English means chores. This was a word that most of the students were not able to wrap their head around and understand the meaning. This sense of confusion was shared between both the English and Spanish Experts. Having both groups confused made it harder to rely on the Spanish Experts to help their bilingual buddy understand the word.

(3) Reteach: describe how you could/will reteach the lesson for students who may need extra support beyond what you offered in the lesson.
In my case all of my students needed to be retaught and review the vocabulary words. If I were to reteach this lesson as a whole I now know that I need to spend more time on explaining and acting out the vocabulary words for the students. I realized that a lot of the students did not have the chores that I had as a kid, when asked they said that their chores were to do their homework, go to bed, and go to school. I was thinking that they would have more background knowledge about chores that included cleaning and taking care of their personal items. To reteach the word quehaceres, I would bring in more pictures of children doing different household chores to have a higher rate of personal connections between the chores the students in my room do and the "stereotypical" chores that other students might do.

(4) Extend: describe how you could/will extend the lesson for students who successfully met your expectations (i.e., how will you help students build on what they've already mastered?).
For the students who understood the vocabulary words, I would pair them up with a student who is still having trouble understanding the meaning. This configuration would allow the student who understood the vocabulary to review it themselves while also deepening their connection to the material while helping to support another student who needs some more guidance in their comprehension of the vocabulary word. For the students who completely understood the objective of understanding that all families are different and participate in different activities together, they could pair up with another student of the same level of understanding and compare and contrast the activities that their families do together. This would help the students to see the differences within families between themselves and their friend in the classroom.

Changing Conviction

Interns: You've been in your internship classroom since late August, assisting your Classroom Teacher in launching the school year. For your first blog post describe, briefly, one strong conviction about teaching that you brought to the classroom that has changed considerably during this time. What changed, and why is this a sign of personal growth?

Since I accepted my student teaching position at West View and knowing that I would have to teach in Spanish all year long, I was not only worried about the language aspect that I would be on the learning curve with, but also worried that what I have learned in my university courses would not be directly applicable to my internship. For the last part of the summer I began to doubt my abilities to effectively run a classroom that will operate in my second language. Being able to start in August with Miss Lopez and have various conversations about what the year and the curriculum will look like for the year, I began to see how my knowledge will transfer beautifully. The classroom operates in the same manner as most other classrooms with the exception of doing a block middle school set up where the students trade rooms for different subjects as well as being completely taught in Spanish. I now find myself rediscovering a unit that we have discussed in classes and become excited to learn how to adapt it to work in the structure of the bilingual program.  

Hola a Todos!

This is a place for me to share the exciting adventures that I will have working in Miss Lopez's 1st grade classroom at West View in Burlington with you.