End of Week 1

Week of Reflection: Friday, February 1, 2018

This has been quite an interesting week! This was my first full week of teaching and I think it went well for the craziness that the week held! On Monday, I had to be out due to bronchitis. I hated being away from my students, so I was eager to be back in the classroom on Tuesday! On Thursday and Friday of this week, my teacher has been out of town, so I have had a substitute in my room just to be an extra set of hands in case anything was to go wrong. Therefore, I was really by myself on my first week! It was a great experience though and I know that the rest of my 10 weeks will be exciting and rewarding! Overall, I would rate this week as a 5 because despite all the obstacles that I had to face, everything went well!

A pleasant accomplishment this week would have to be just getting that first week over with of teaching everything. It was a huge milestone to get over. Only 9 more weeks to go!

A lesson that I learned this week is that even though we have a math program at my school, we aren’t required to follow it word for word. It is supposed to be used more as a guide than a script. I tried following along just as the lesson did in the book, but I found that it does not work for me. I didn’t feel like the students learned anything from it being done that way, so I know that I will definitely go back to just using it as a guide for my lessons.

This past week, I set up an observation time with the principal at my school. He asked if he could come in and observe me just like he would a teacher that worked at his school. I will be able to get feedback and a copy of everything that he felt I did good at and the things that I need to work on. This short term effort aligns with my long term goal of having my own classroom in the near future!

I feel like I could have spent more time on edTPA this week. I feel that I am prepared to teach next week, but I feel that more time could have been spent on it.

I was a little apprehensive teaching without my CE being present, but I quickly got over that and kept moving forward. I knew that if my students could see the apprehension in my eyes, then I would never get anywhere with them. I kept the routine and taught what I had prepared and everything went great!

The first step for next week is to get everything prepared to record my edTPA lessons!

We finally got all of our scores in place from middle of year testing and our new WIN groups have been formed. This gave me the opportunity to find out who would be in my group and what they needed to work on. This gave me the opportunity to plan accordingly.

I began my positive monthly phone calls this past week and will continue to finish them at the beginning of the coming week (I have such a huge class). I must say, this has been so rewarding! Hearing the parents say how much they appreciate hearing from me and keeping that communication line open is so nice to hear. I wanted to explain to them all that it was my first full week and the changes that would be happening in the next few weeks with me teaching full time. It was so nice to just speak to them about GOOD things their students are doing and how proud I am of all of them. I recommend talking with all of your parents at least once while you are teaching!

NC Teacher Candidate Standards

Standard 1: I worked with the 3rd grade team and testing coordinators to develop our new WIN groups.

Standard 2: I began making positive phone calls home to interact with the parents/families and work together with them to get their students everything that they need to be successful.

Standard 3: This past week, we worked on the skeletal system. We talked about breaking a bone and what happens if we do that around here. Then, we talked about children in other countries and what they go through if they break a bone. I showed pictures of hospitals in Africa and we compared/contrasted their hospitals to ours. We also looked at a picture of a cast that we would have here in the USA and then we looked at a picture of bamboo and a picture of palm leaves to show the students that in other countries the bamboo is used to stabilize the broken bone and the palm leaf is wrapped around for support.

Standard 4: I shied away from a lot of class discussions like we had done in the past and let my students work in teams this week to complete different fables that we were discussing. It was cool to see how everyone worked together and what they accomplished.

Standard 5: I reflected on the teaching of the math lesson straight from the book and knew that my students could have learned more, so I made the change to go back to just using it as a guide.