So, I have successfully finished my full takeover of the classroom. To phase out, my cooperating teacher and I have been co-teaching many lessons. One subject we have been co-teaching in is writing. For this unit, we have begun to teach the students the art of persuasive writing. To begin, we read the two books Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type and I Want An Iguana (two of my personal favorites). These books discuss the topic of making a change in one’s world and giving reasons for that change.

Now, some people may underestimate five and six years olds and think that trying to change the world is way too difficult for them, but I completely disagree! These students were completely capable of thinking of problems they saw around their own lives. Some problems included: running in the hallway, not having enough marshmallows in their Lucky Charms cereal, being mean to other students, not following rules, etc. The students then had the opportunity to brainstorm reasons why these ideas were problems. To culminate the activity, the students were given the opportunity to create a poster or letter to their fellow schoolmates to inform them of what changes they wanted to see happen in the school. The students even had the opportunity to post these lovely creations around the school building.

Student Work:

Now, I completely loved this activity. The students were so engaged in what they were doing and truly realized that they could impact the world around them. Even though they are so young, I think this is an important lesson to start teaching. No one is ever too young or small to make a difference!! This activity truly allowed the students to put their persuasive skills into a real world context.

Miss H. 

The kindergarten classroom that I have been teaching in is a half-day kindergarten classroom. This means that the students are only in school for about two and a half hours a day, less if they have specials that day. This means that as a teacher, you need to make sure that each child gets a chance to learn and have hands on experience with the necessary information. For me, the easiest way to ensure that this happened was by teaching whole class lessons. However, I can honestly say that whole class instruction is not my teaching preference. Instead, I prefer small group activities; however, with the time crunch, teacher support, and preparation associated with small group activities, it is hard to set these up.

This week, I made it my goal to teach the students in smaller and more individualized groups. So, I created a centers rotation for the students to participate in.In total, there were three different centers: social studies, mathematics, and language arts. Each center had room for about six to seven different students and was managed by either a teacher or a teacher’s assistant.

I believe that these centers went nicely because I was able to differentiate and give the students more individualized attention to their specific academic needs. I was also able to take an hour of academic learning time and incorporate three different subjects. This to me was an effective use of time management, planning and preparation to ensure students had success in each center.

Miss H.

For those of you who do not know me personally, I would like to inform you that I am a very talkative person. I absolutely love to talk because there are so many great stories and ideas to share each day. However, I am beginning to realize that the amount of talking I do each day has dramatically increased now that I have taken over the responsibility of teaching a kindergarten classroom.

The amount of talking that a teacher does in any one given day is amazing. So amazing actually that is only the beginning of week three of my full takeover of the classroom and my voice has mysteriously disappeared. Yep, it’s gone! Thankfully, my cooperating teacher quickly understood the problem I was facing and took over the teaching for the day.

Personally, I found this experience so frustrating and difficult to work with. I was walking around the classroom assisting the students, but my main form of communication was not working. Any time I tried to talk to the students, it sounded as if an old frog was croaking. So, here are a few tips I pulled together from my lovely experience of laryngitis.

Laryngitis Prevention Tips:

#1: NEVER yell over your students

• There is no point in yelling over the students (they probably won’t here you anyway). If they are not listening to you, then take away time from any reward they get during the day (recess, a party, choice time, etc.). Remember the students are wasting their own time!

#2: Have lots of effective classroom management tools

• If your students are being noisy and not listening, it is time to evoke those wonderful classroom management techniques you have been practicing!

#3: Tea + Honey = Heaven

•  Not only does it taste good, but it sure does soothe an achy throat

Miss H.

It is only week two of my full takeover and I am constantly struggling with my time management. Between the hours of 8:00 am and 4:00 pm, I find time in the day where there is nothing planned to teach. Now as a teacher, this is not something you want to happen. Imagine sitting in a classroom with twenty six year olds and having nothing to teach for twenty minutes. This situation easily becomes hectic and chaotic.

So, I have quickly learned that a teacher must be proactive and be over prepared each day. This means coming up with more lessons than you think you can teach, filler activities in case students are done early and substitute lesson ideas in case you need to spice up the energy in the room. Key point: It does not matter whether or not the students complete every task you plan to teach, what matters is that you do not have students waste time idly sitting around the room while the teacher attempts to plan for the next twenty minutes of time.

Miss H.

Last night, I had the opportunity to meet the parents, guardians and families of the students I am currently working with. This occurred on a special night when my students got to be the “teachers” and show their families around their school. Students had the opportunity to visit their classroom, the book fair, the specials area, and show parents some work they have created.

Personally, I was very nervous to meet the parents. However, my nerves were calmed the minute the first parent, a middle school technology teacher at another district, came into the room announcing “I-L-L”. Now, as a student teacher and a true Illini, this showed me that the parents of my students are just regular ordinary people, nothing to be afraid of.

In all honesty, all these parents want to know is who you are, if their child is having fun, and are they succeeding in school both socially and academically.

Miss H.

One snowy morning about two weeks ago I found myself sitting in the teacher’s lounge. Now, normally I would have been in the classroom going over the day’s plans with my cooperating teacher; however, the commute that morning had been horrible due to the lovely winter we are currently experiencing, so a lot of the teachers were delayed, including my cooperating teacher. I felt that instead of sitting outside the classroom and waiting by myself, that I should go socialize with the teachers that had already arrived. To my surprise, one of the fifth grade teachers sitting in the lounge gave me some advice that I have been thinking about for a while now.

This fifth grade teacher had just asked me how my student teaching experience was going. After my initial response of “It’s wonderful. I feel like I’m learning so much already”, I began to express the apprehension I was feeling towards doing my full takeover. Now do not get confused. I am so excited to complete my full takeover (which by the way begins on March 31^st, 2 weeks away…not that I’m counting or anything…) because it something I have been itching to do since freshman year. However, at the same time, I am so nervous because the teaching responsibilities truly become mine. It’s as scary as it is exciting. So, after my rambling, this fifth grade teacher looked at me calmly and just said “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. It’s going to fly by.” This is the normal comment I get from any teacher I talk to, but this teacher continued on. “Just don’t forget. The best thing you can do is to make mistakes. Make lots of mistakes because now is the perfect time for you to do it”.

Now as odd as this advice sounds it really stuck with me. This really is the perfect time for me to make mistakes. At this specific moment, I have a lot of wonderful teachers and a supervisor who are all more than willing to help me out with any problems I come across. I know I will have other people who will want to help me in the future, but now more than ever, these people are here to teach me how to be a better teacher and catch me when I completely fall on my face, so to speak.

This advice struck me again today when I had my midterm conference with my supervisor and cooperating teacher. One thing that my supervisor discussed is that she thought that I did a great job reflecting on my practice, but at the same time she was worried that I tend to beat myself up too much. So, it seems at this moment, I do not realize how great the mistakes I am making really are.

From all this, one major lesson I, as a student teacher, have learned is that mistakes are bound to happen. Instead of obsessing over the mistake itself, I really need to start thinking “OK. That was horrible, but now what can I do to make it better?”

Miss H.

Teacher Institute Day. These three simple words fill students with excitement. A day off of school! As a student, these days were always filled with activities such as sleeping in, going out for lunch with my family, going shopping, watching a movie at the theaters, catching up on homework, or just relaxing. However, I have now officially transitioned from the role of being a “student” to the role of being a “teacher”. This means teacher institute day easily translates into a full day of professional development activities.

Since this was my first time ever attending a professional development day, I was unsure of exactly how it ran. My day ended up being split in half and filled with three different meetings. In the morning I was scheduled to attend a kindergarten meeting with my cooperating teacher and then head on down to a math curriculum meeting. (We never made it down to the math meeting because everyone involved in the kindergarten meeting got so involved in the meeting that we lost track of the time.) In the afternoon, my schedule consisted of participating in a Daily 5 workshop, led by my cooperating teacher and a few other teachers at the building I student teach in.

During this specific day, the professional development activities incorporated teachers from all specialties and grade levels K-8. To me, this was the most valuable aspect because I got to see how teachers from three different buildings in one single district got together to successfully collaborate on the new curriculum and other topics of great importance that the district wanted their teachers to explore. It was interesting to hear teachers from the other buildings work on the curriculum in different ways than the teachers I am currently observing. I feel that this collaboration between all the individuals is beneficial to everyone involved and I feel so blessed to be included in days such as these.

Miss H.

Every day that I am in my student teaching placement, I constantly notice that I spend most of the time smiling. This is a wonderful thing and a good portion of it can be attributed to the fact that “kids really do say the darndest things”. I have noticed that there are moments after students talk to me that I have to nod, walk away and just laugh.

For example, this week, I was teaching a math lesson in which students were practicing their addition of numbers up to 10. This lesson was set up so that the students imagined they were on a farm and had to count up the various animals they had and the various animals that nearby farmers were giving them. The students were expected to follow along with their ten frames and number cubes to demonstrate that they understood the overall concept.

Now, as I was conducting this lesson, I found myself stalling to figure out different animals to use because I wanted to make sure I varied up the word problems I was telling the students. Out of nowhere, one of the students suggested, with great enthusiasm might I add, that I use caribous in one of the examples. My first reaction is that caribous do not live on farms, but I decided to go with it because I loved that my students were helping to create number sentences. Just as I started my word problem with caribous, I watched the student who suggested the idea giggle and turn to his neighbor. He proceeded to speak the words “I don’t even know what a caribou is”. Immediately, I stopped what I was saying and giggled along with him. Then I regained my composure and continued on. At that specific moment, it was just so amusing that this one student really wanted to use caribous in an example, but had no idea of what they even were or if they had even lived on a farm. Now, this is not the funniest thing I have heard, but at the specific moment, it was so amusing that I could not contain my laughter.

From this moment, I have learned it is so hard to keep one’s composure during these times. I know that there will be more instances in which a student will come up to me and say something that completely surprises me. So, I truly need to work on my ability to graze over the comment and continue what I was doing. Then later on when the students are out of sight, I will be free to laugh about what just happened.

Miss H.

The day is finally here! The 100^th day of school! The students were all so excited for this day because they have been counting up to it since the first day of school. There were a ton of activities to participate in. Here is just a short list of what we did that day:

1. We created hats with 100 finger stamps on them.
2. We searched the room with our 100 glasses for all our numbers.
3. We saw how many times they could roll a dice to add to 100.
4. We counted how many times they could tap a balloon in the air in 100 seconds.
5. We counted how many times they could write their name in 100 seconds.
6. We counted how many hearts they could color in 100 seconds.
7. We created a delicious graham cracker, frosting and skittle dessert with “100” as a decoration.
8. We sang a special 100 Day song to the whole school through the PA system.

Prior to this day, the students also got to create wonderful pictures using the number “100”. Here are a few examples of what the students put together.

On top of all the activities, many of the students were dressed up as if they were 100 years old. It was such an exciting day for everyone involved!

I have learned that on this day it is especially important to get all dressed up and into the spirit of the 100^th day. This means teachers should either dress up as if they were 100 years old or wear an outfit that has 100 items on it, such as ribbons. The more that a teacher gets excited and involved in these special days, the more the kindergarteners seem to get into the theme and enjoy the day.

Miss H.