Week 12

This is the final blog I am sad to say, but it was a great semester with great experiences! Today at field experience, it was rough not only because of the classroom, but because of the weather too. It was freezing out! Aside from that, our teacher showed us a couple of tips and tricks of the trade while the students were in specials. She had this great reading activities book where the bookmarks were actual quick lessons that could be used as meaningful time fillers and she also showed us a social studies lesson that she was going to present later on in the day. The great thing about the social studies lesson was that it was literature based. The students were to read a book based on the time when Indiana was first being settled. Based off of this book, the students were to make an oral presentation about what the book was about, as well as write as if they were founding their own settlement. They were to think about the types of things they needed to survive, what kind of buildings they lived in, and what kind of people would live there. It was a really neat activity and lesson for the students for sure!

Later on in the class, the students were holding their very first book club where they talked about the first few chapters of the book they read. I had the opportunity to facilitate the ladies who were reading "Misty of Chincoteague". We talked about what questions they had so far, and then we went around and read our favorite passages that we found. After that, we made inferences of what we thought might happen based off of what we had read. Their homework for the next day was to write three paragraphs: the first was a summary of what they read so far, the second was a description of the characters (horses), and the last paragraph was just about discussion questions that each student would like to bring to book club the next time. The one problem I had with this was that although I do agree that all of the students should be on the same pace, they didn't seem that challenged by the amount that they were reading. It seemed like they were bored by the pace they were taking, so if it were me, I would have had them read more each night.

Week 11

Today in class we made booklets for the students so that they could take down observations when they watch a movie later on this week about characterization. The students will be watching Scooby Doo and writing about each of the individual characters, their traits, and whether or not they think that character will solve the mystery based off of these traits. The teacher called it "sneaky learning" because the students would think that they were having a movie break before Thanksgiving, but really they're learning about literature. Later on during class, we worked with our kidwatching kid and helped them to catch up on work that they had not yet completed. They were learning about Native Americans and the different vocabulary words, and also recalling facts about what they had read. I noticed today that my kidwatching kid, although being a very competent reader, actually has a lot of difficulties recalling exact details and would often have to refer back to the texts to answer her questions. She also had to write a reflection about she thought about a sentence that the teacher had posted on the board. I wasn't sure if she couldn't read her own writing, but she had extreme difficulties reading her paragraph aloud to me when I know she is a strong reader. I guess I was just confused about what she was struggling with today, hopefully it was just sloppy handwriting.

Week 10

Unfortunately, I missed this week because I was sick, but interestingly enough, I ran into a student this previous weekend who seemed extremely excited to see me. He wondered where I had been, and when I explained that I wasn't feeling very well he was satisfied and then said he would see me next week! I was tickled because I felt somewhat like a real teacher for a moment. It always interests me to see how students are going to react to seeing a teacher outside of the classroom. Sometimes students are intimidated by seeing their teacher, but the fact that this student approached me like an old friend made me feel important and made me feel like I was missed. I can't wait for the student to approach me in the mall/grocery/wherever to be one of MY students.

Week 9

Today at field experience, our teacher was absent. So, because of this absence she left us an activity to prepare for the kids to do when they came back from specials. Basically what we had to do was cut out little cards from a sheet of paper and break the students up into groups of two. The cards each had clues using the definition and root of the word so that they would lead to the next card. One student would have the first card, the second student would have the other and it would go back and forth until the students ran out of cards. We were supposed to explain the activity to the class and then go around and answer questions, however the activity was a disaster. None of the students understood what they were supposed to be doing, and the cards were really mixed up. So, the other IU teachers and I decided that we were going to go through the cards as a class, and I thought the activity was much more fun. The first student read the first card, and if the students knew the answer they would raise their hand. If I called on them and they knew the answer, they would get to read their clue, and if they got it wrong, they would have to look through their cards and try again. I think when the class was thinking together like that, the energy was much better, and the activity was somewhat redeeming because the first attempt was such a disaster. I understand that sometimes lessons don't go exactly as planned, but the frustrating part was that we weren't the ones that came up with the lesson and neither the students nor the teacher knew how to participate. It was rough!

Week 8

This week at University I feel like I had one of the most productive days that I've had yet. Usually when it is my time to be in the classroom, my students are in their specials, and based off of what I witnessed last week, I am no longer going to observe their specials time simply because it makes me really upset to watch. So, I helped the teacher along with Tabitha and Adrian to grade the post-assessment on context clues. It was actually really interesting to see how students would select different words in the context to define the words that they didn't know, although it was also kind of disheartening because most of the students seemed like they were really struggling. Most of them were getting only about half of their answers correct, or maybe just a little more than half, but the scores were still very, very low.

When the students finally did come back into the classroom we had the opportunity to work with our kidwatching kid on a sketch-to-stretch activity which really helped me to get my kid a lot better. As it turns out, my kid is quite the artist and is also very good at articulating her thoughts. That's really been my first good conversation with her because I haven't had a lot of time with her.

Finally, the thing that's upsetting to me is now that we've figured out the best way to remedy the schedule issue with the specials thing, my teacher is going on leave for three weeks because of surgery. I feel like I'm really not quite getting all of the experiences that I was hoping to with the students or with the curriculum. I just want to have a part in the classroom! I am not a good by-stander.

Week 7

Ok, so the truth is I completely forgot to do this and we are now doing a blog for week 8. So, I am backtracking because I have something that I can't forget to write down that really bothered me last week. When I was observing the 4th graders in their specials last Wednesday I was absolutely shocked and appalled by the way the teacher was acting towards her students. To start off with, her class was barely being managed. Kids were running around, taking things from each other, screaming, and not listening to the teacher at all. Rather than correcting the situation, the teacher ignored what was happening and proceeded to talk over all of the students, which didn't solve the problem. The the teacher was talking about landscapes and brought up the artist T.C. Steele. The teacher began to question the class about the artist and as the children responded thoughtfully, she rolled her eyes at them, looking at them like they were stupid, saying things like, "yeah sure", and finally gave up on them. There was no guidance from her and it was really awkward because I don't think the students or myself understood what she was trying to get from the class. The teacher was also asking about some kind of order form that she sent home with the students, and when many of the students didn't have them to return to her, she said very condescendingly, "I knew you guys would do this to me" like it was a slap in the face to her. The teacher also was walking around the classroom and blatantly criticizing her students in front of other students. She walked up to a table of students and said to us "See this young lady here? I wish my entire class was just like her, then my life would be perfect." As soon as she walked away, the other students said to each other "I hate art, she's always criticizing us all the time." She also went around and said things like, "These trees are awful. I'm going to probably have to do a lesson just on drawing trees". I just think that its wrong for a teacher to make any child to feel like they are unintelligent. I also was extremely offended that the teacher was just writing off every student and their response and rolling her eyes. I don't know how that is ever ok to make students feel stupid for sharing their thoughts or opinions. I also don't know how a teacher like that has a secure job during such difficult times for teachers. I guess I was so shocked not only because that was the first bad teacher I had witnessed, but just the magnitude of how awful she was towards her students really made me want to say something. But then of course, I am only an IU student observing her classroom. That leads me to wonder, if I could even do anything about it at all?

Week 6

After thinking all week about what I was going to do for my multigenre research paper, I have now come to the conclusion that I am going to write about vegetarianism. I myself have been a vegetarian for the past four years and I am always asked "Why did you decide to become a vegetarian?", or "is that hard? I could never do that."I am hoping that by writing this paper and presenting all of the facts, I can help people to understand why I would make a lifestyle choice like that. Aside from the paper, I have been looking forward to observing an active writer's workshop this next week for our field observation. I think that although I remember doing it in elementary school, it will be a great refresher and will also help me to better understand how to apply all of the skills and tips we have been learning in our cluster classes. I also need to choose a child to kidwatch so I can start recording that student in class. I am still unsure who I want to select, but I'm thinking of one child who seems really intelligent, but also seems to get worked up really easily when he is stressed in the least. I think he will be really interesting to observe, and I feel like I can learn a lot of ways to work with his learning needs by learning more about his learning habits.