It has been five weeks that I have been helping out in my assigned classroom and school. I was not quite sure what to expect by this time in the year, but I thought that I would be beginning to feel overwhelmed with school that I would not enjoy going to help out my cooperating teacher. I thought that I might be a little bit drained by this point. I am so happy to say this is not the case. I am so amazed at how excited I am to go and help out still. I love being there and I am never checking my watch to see how much more time I have felt. I feel like I am enjoying each minute of being there and this is so reassuring to me. I always wanted to choose a career path that I felt like I loved and I think teaching is that. I love spending the time with the kids, teaching them, helping my cooperating teacher, and being in the classroom. It is great!
This wonderful opportunity has been showing me more and more things that I can use in my future classroom. My cooperating teacher does this thing called "snap, clap, tap" spelling words. What the kids do is they say the word and then spell it out by snapping along, clapping along, and then tapping along. I love this! I think that it is a great way to keep the students active and involved. Another thing that I really liked is a math game they play. The kids sit in a circle and they pass around a box of math problems. They get to shake it up, pick a problem, say the answer and then pass it on. This gives the classroom a more relax feel, give the students the opportunity to do it themselves, play a game, and learn.
I still have still been working with one of the ESL students with his ABC's. I asked my teacher if I could work with him during spelling and reading time. He has come a long way in these five weeks! I knows almost the whole alphabet now! He struggles a little bit with distinguishing between "E" and "V", but that is it! I am planning to bring some shaving cream to class next week to have him write the letter in the shaving cream. I want to change up the way he learns the letter. I want him to be able to write them now, but I want to make sure that we are doing this in a fun way to begin. He sometimes gets frustrated because he does not want to be learning, so I want to find some new ways of approaching learning to make it fun for him.
In ED 203, we have been exploring teaching and schools. I have been able to have the pleasure of talking with my cooperating teacher during gym class and she tells me about what their school requires them to do in the classroom and more. I have learned that they require their students to be doing this reading program where the students read for a certain amount of weeks independently everyday for fifteen minutes, then they will read to their teachers, then to the class and so on. This is to increase students abilities to read. Teachers are required by their principles and more to preform certain actions and teach certain criteria in their classrooms. It has been an eye-opener to actually be in the class and see how the school actually runs, instead of hear about it.
