11/18-11/22

Being placed at North Elementary has opened my eyes to how diversity affects the classroom. Because some of my students are not originally from the US, many of them do not celebrate Thanksgiving. I found it a little bit difficult to help these students connect to this important US holiday. My mentor teacher showed me the lessons she had planned for after Thanksgiving, which is a unit based around multiple winter holidays. The students would learn about Christmas, Chanukah, Three Kings Day, The Korean New Year, and Kwanza. I also noticed just from walking about in the hallways that many of the other teachers do something similar. North is truly a unique school and I am so lucky to have has the experience to teach there.

11/11-11/15

This semester I started a teacher mailbox where students could write notes, draw me pictures,or tell me about their day. I absolutely loved having this opportunity to further connect with my students. In my cases, I was able to help solve a students problem who might have been too shy to tell me them self. Also, this mailbox got the students writing whenever they had the chance. I've learned that it is important to utilize every opportunity as a teaching experience. With this mailbox, students don't realize the writing practice they are gaining. I plan on having this system in my future classroom.

11/4-11/8

For the past 3 months, I have been tutoring one student after school in reading. I work with him for 45 minutes every wednesday. I am very happy to report that this student has shown great improvement in his reading ability. He seems to have learned how to sound out words and look for patterns. I am so proud of all the work he has accomplished throughout the past semester. I hope that I can continue working with this student even after my internship ends. Also from this experience, I myself have learned the reasoning behind why words sound the way they do. It is quite funny what we as adults forget from grade school.

10/28-11/1

This week I had an incident with one of my students who was extremely disrespectful and rude. During writers workshop time, I was trying to help him edit his paper, which was a complete disaster. This student who is in TAG, could not take any criticism and gave me attitude everytime I gave a suggestion. When I finishe editing his paper, I told him to write his final copy and he simply responded back with "No". I was shocked and honestly did not know what to say. I've had issues with this student in the past because he believes he knows everything, which is pretty frustrating. As a punishment I pulled him outside and questioned why he was so rude.He has no asnwer and basically stood in silence. I then decided he has to stay in for recess and write a paragaph on why respect is important. The child wrote a good few sentences. I plan on talking to his mother about the sitiation during parent conferences.

10/21/-10/25

One morning, one of the other second grade teacher's alarm clock did not go off which caused her to oversleep. Due to this, I saw what would happen in this type of situation where a sub is not present. My mentor teacher stayed in the classroom with out students and I went into the other room to help a tag teacher deal with the situation. Luckily the class was completing an activity that was very similiar to the one I would be doing later in the day. I didn't want to feel like I was stepping on the other teachers toes by taking over but I knew the instructions. It is stressful taking over someone elses calss and it was kind of a reality check for when I begin subbing. I did though recognize how well my classsroom is organized; this experience really made me appreciate my classroom that much more!

10/14-10/18

Today I gave a pretest for my action researcg project! My whole project is based around the question " How does Parent involvement affect student achievment?" For this pretest, I gave them 2 sheets about coins. The sheets required them to identify the sides/ pictures of coins as well as adding cents. I was honestly a bit surprised by the scores from the class. After reviewing all the test, I was able to identify 3 main problems that the majority of students has with coins. Firstly, many of them rushed through there work and made obvious little mistakes. The second problem was that almost 80 percent of the class forgot to use units ( the cent sign). The last problem was that students had trouble just identifying which coin is which. These problems will be something I talk to my students parents about tomorrow. Question: Will all parents who RSVP'd to come show up?

Intern Year: 10/7-10/11

Until I had the opporunity to rearrange seating in the classroom, I never realized just how difficult this process it. A teacher needs to consider students that have special needs, students who can't sit next to each other, and other special circumstances. I think I revised my original seating chart at least 2 times to accomadate all students. The first thing I tried to do was seperate students who have bavioral issues away from each other. I think seated students who have special needs or need asstances during instructional time. Lastly,I tried to put at least 1 tag kid at each table to act as some what of a leader. Also, I plan on changing the layout of the seating. In the beggining of the year the students were split into 3 groups of 8. Now, I plan on having 6 groups of 4. I hope because the groups are smaller, this will prevent talking.