Ending Week 4

Week of Reflection: Friday, March 1, 2019

Overall, I would rate this past week a 3. It wasn’t a great week, but it wasn’t a terrible one either. Getting back into the swing of things after surgery has been hard. It’s not that I was having a hard time re-connecting with my students, but I just felt like I had missed so much. It was also not the most ideal time to be out for a week with everything going on with edTPA. I know though that I just have to trust that God had a plan in all of this craziness and I just have to trust Him.

A pleasant accomplishment that I achieved this week was that I finished my first novel study unit with my students. We read The BFG with a literary focus on context clues. There are of course so many changes that I would have done, but I feel it went well and I can now say that I completed my first novel study with a group of students. We are starting another on Monday and I can’t wait to use what I learned from the first one to make the next one even better.

A lesson that I learned this week from my experiences was really about being absent when you’re the teacher. I know that me being absent was out of my control, but it really made me stop and think about when I do become the teacher in my own classroom, how important it is to be there, not only for your students, but also for yourself. I had surgery Wednesday and was back in the classroom on Monday. I missed my students so much and was eager to see them all again. Also, the students suffer from you being gone as well. You can leave wonderful plans for the sub, but those don’t matter. You have a special connection with your students and in order for them to truly learn, you need to be there. Thankfully, in this situation, my CE taught since I wasn’t there, but that won’t be the case when it is my classroom!

This past week I spent a lot of time on edTPA. That was expected because of the submission date, but I feel that my lesson plans suffered because of that.

The next step for next week is to focus more on lesson plans now that edTPA will be submitted!

I noticed when grading my student’s spelling tests and looking at previous grades, that my students struggle in spelling. It could be that they are not practicing at home, but it made me integrate more spelling activities into the instructional day. We now have a spelling center where students play spelling tic-tac-toe and students practice writing sentences with their spelling words for morning work once a week.

A piece of advice I would share with other student teachers is that we are halfway

finished! We can finish strong just like we started!

NC Teacher Candidate Standards

Standard 1: I used data to impact how much time I give for spelling each day.

Standard 2: It’s the end of the month again so I am making positive phone calls again! I will also get to meet with a few of my parents at Parent/Teacher conferences this coming week.

Standard 3: We have begun an entrepreneurship unit for social studies and the students are really enjoying it! I’m enjoying watching them learn!

Standard 4: My students are creating their own business with a small group. They only have $5,000 to start their business and they are using critical thinking and problem solving skills to start their business.

Standard 5: I am collecting data on how students are working through their entrepreneurship project so I can see things that need to change about it if I were to use it in my future classroom.