Reflection- Courtney

This was week one of lead teaching for me and it was awesome! I was so nervous about the transition into a new environment (Joe's room), but the kids were extremely receptive and respectful of me and changes that I made. I feel like it was a fun and very successful week overall!

One thing that really worked well this week was the implementation of a new incentive system in our team. I came up with a token system, called tokens of hope. Students could receive them by showing respect, empathy, and responsibility. These are the concepts that our school is based upon. The use of these has made management more manageable and the kids love them! I am going to take it a step further this week and have the Parthenon person of the day based on how many tokens they get per day.

I learned this week that I love to teach math! It is so much more concrete than anything I have taught before and I love hearing the discussion and problem solving going on in the classroom. This is something I am looking forward to hearing this upcoming week as well. I enjoy getting to see students that I normally don't see in math excel in something, if they may not in language arts where I was more likely to see them. I love seeing those successes, especially in students that I am not used to seeing it in. I have enjoyed building the concepts up as the week went on and drawing connections between that days lesson and days previous. I was also very excited to see a great connection to calendar math in this weeks lessons with the turning fractions into decimals. They do this weekly, and it made the lesson a whole lot easier to understand and connect to!

I have also really enjoyed getting to know another set of kids as well as I know the kids in Mrs. Hergenrader's homebase. There is such a different dynamic in Mr. Cleary's room and I have really enjoyed working with it. Man are the chatty though!