Saved by the Bel(ding): April 2015

I haven’t blogged in almost five weeks! I guess no news is good news…? Now that I’m officially in the swing of things in 2^nd grade, I feel like I’m so busy all the time! It’s a good kind of busy – planning read-aloud activities and arts and crafts projects, coming up with creative ways to engage students, and maintaining my own school work.

There’s a lot of work that goes into planning for a single day of school. In previous field experiences, I have only been responsible for teaching one or two lessons a day, so the planning and teaching process never seemed too bad. Even in my special education placement, I was only responsible for teaching math, so I focused solely on math lessons. In this 2^nd grade placement, I plan lessons for writing, handwriting, reading, social studies, science, and math. General education elementary educators teach all subjects, so I knew I would to have to do a lot more planning than I had previously done. This 2^nd grade placement has definitely shown me what to expect on a daily basis when I begin teaching full-time.

I am loving 2^nd grade! 2^nd graders are the perfect age group to work with. They know how to read but still need support in learning new strategies to become better readers. They can do basic math facts and are always looking for advanced ways to solve math problems. They can write sentences, but they are at the beginning stages of forming developed paragraphs and pieces of writing. They are independent but can be needy at times. My role as the teacher is to teach a lesson and then allow the students to work with concepts independently.

Classroom description

There are 25 students in my 2^nd grade classroom who are pretty advanced for their age. Most of them are already working on 3^rd or 4^th grade math which is awesome! My supervising teacher has been really supportive in transitioning me into the daily routines and listens to ideas I have for certain lessons or activities. I have learned so much from her about the need for specific routines to organization to dealing with various behaviors. Her classroom management is crazy good. The students automatically know what to do as soon as they step into the classroom in the morning. One strategy my teacher uses to help her with classroom management is her token economy system. The students receive pennies to put in their individual banks every morning. Whenever a student does not follow the rules, she takes a penny away from him or her. The students value their pennies and become motivated to “do the right thing” in order to keep all their pennies. At the end of the month, my teacher pulls out the classroom store where the students can purchase items with the money in their banks.

So what have I been up to?

Five weeks have flown by! I started my experience in 2^nd grade by observing my teacher and learning classroom routines.

Week one: I began reading interventions with six students during their reading stations. Each student is at a different reading level and needs assistance in a different area, such as fluency, comprehension, or vocabulary. Each student and I go through 15 minutes of interventions to focus on the specific area of need. It’s so great to see the students’ daily and weekly progress!

Week two: Handwriting and writing were the first subjects I took over completely. I teach a handwriting lesson once a week, which involves teaching the students how to properly write lowercase and uppercase letters. All of the students know how to write, but these handwriting lessons teach them to write neater. In writing, I started a new unit on teaching opinion writing. My teacher has never taught this unit, so we have been going through this together! I began by teaching the students about facts and opinions, and then focused solely on forming and expressing opinions.

Week three: Along with teaching handwriting and writing, I took on reading and social studies. There is no set social studies time, so the social studies lesson is embedded into reading. I am teaching Civil Rights through picture books and read-alouds. After I read a book to the whole class, we have a discussion about what we read (Rosa Parks, MLK Jr., Ruby Bridges, etc.). Then, the students complete an assignment individually that relates to the reading. This assignment asks them to incorporate ideas that we talked about in the class discussion and consists of an extension that helps me to see what the individual student learned.

Week four: I added on science during this week. Science is taught two to three times a week. The unit that I am teaching is “Balance and Motion,” so the students are learning about balancing different objects and the forces that come into play when these objects move. Last week, we created mobiles out of index cards and paper clips and figured out how to balance each side!

Week five: This past week, I took over math, which meant that I was officially teaching all of the subjects. The math lessons are short, 15-20 minute lessons that focus on specific skills such as adding multi-digit numbers, strategies for doing mental math, mean/median/mode, etc. Math is divided into stations, so once the lesson is taught, the students work on the skill with me in small groups and then work on it individually.

I have three more weeks in this placement and then it’s all done! It’s hard to believe that I’m almost done with my final semester in college and will soon have my own classroom. Graduation is in one month and one day!

Out-of-school activities

Here are some pictures of things I’ve done and places I’ve visited on the weekends. With only a few weekends left in Chicago, we’re trying to find time for everything!