Week 8

Week of Reflection: Friday, March 29, 2019

This has been a great week! I would rate it as a 5. This was my 8th full week of teaching and I only have two left to go. It’s hard to believe. Time has flown by so quickly.

A pleasant surprise this week was how well my students did with using critical thinking skills in our reading of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I began asking critical thinking questions after the chapter reading for the day and my students had some great answers which led to great discussions. I’m so proud of all of their hard work!

Last week, I wrote about how chatty my students were. This week, before beginning math, I did a brain break with my students after lunch and it seemed to help them. I will continue to do these at this time to allow students to get their chatter out after lunch.

My short term efforts of lesson planning and working on my portfolio align to my long-term goal of having everything complete by the end.

I feel like I managed my time well this week. Having a planning day on Friday was very helpful in allowing me to plan. I also got to participate in registering students for K-day today and it was so fun to meet future kindergarteners and their families. It’s such an exciting time for them!

My first logical step for next week is to make sure I have my portfolio ready to meet for the next seminar on Tuesday.

Some data that I analyzed this week was student work on the perimeter tests. This allowed me to see that my students understand perimeter and it allowed me to move on to fractions. We have finished our curriculum and now we are going back to things that students need more work on before we go to all review after Spring break.

One thing I wanted to share with other student teachers was something that I observed while I was helping with K-Day. Today, as I was registering families, I watched as other teachers came to take the children to a classroom to explore while parents went to a meeting in the library. I watched as, for some of the children, leave their parents for the first time with a complete stranger. Many of them were so brave and excited to start Kindergarten. It then hit me what an impact we are making. These parents are trusting us with their whole life. They are letting their children go with an adult that had never met before. There is so much truth in the fact that we are held at such high public trust. How could we not? We have someone’s child in our classroom. They are trusting us with their child. Our jobs are so important and sometimes we forget that until we see a small children getting ready for Kindergarten, excited, and ready to take on a whole new adventure.

NC Teacher Candidate Standards

This past week I tried very hard to differentiate for all of my students. I wanted to make sure that each of them were getting what they need. For centers, I had some students working on spelling during their individual center because I knew that they needed more work on spelling than comprehension. This relates to NCTCS Standard 2.

I have also been working on using a lot of vocabulary into each of my lessons. This is how I can interconnect all of the content areas together. I try to pull vocabulary from the chapters we are reading in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, vocabulary in math, and vocabulary in science. This relates to NCTCS Standard 3.