Weeks 1 and 2 - Meredith

Well I forgot about this blog after our first week (oops!), so I'll write about both weeks for this post.

My first week of lead teaching was exhausting. After being in Guatemala for a week, getting back super late, and not having all of my work completed for the lead teaching time, I spent an incredible amount of time preparing every night. I was nervous about what I was doing because I was starting two brand new units in literacy and social studies, and I had plans to start both units with interactive things. The mystery scavenger hunts ended up going so great! I was nervous about the afternoon class being able to handle being around the school, but they ended up handling it great. Everyone was excited about the mystery and asked if we could do it again. If you would like the list of clues I used, just let me know and I'll email them to you. I had the kids come up with the rules to follow while they were in the halls and reminded them several times that if they were breaking the rules, they would be sent back to the classroom. The activities I had planned for social studies also finished up nicely. The afternoon class had some trouble on the first day and about half the class lost the privilege of going to do the activities in the science lab. But the second day they were allowed to participate and did a good job in their groups.

This past week was a great week. For the most part, the kids had good days every day. Tuesday afternoon was rough for me, but otherwise it was good. It was so encouraging for me. We spent most of the week on the computers so the kids could be researching information on colonial times to put into a PowerPoint. Each student has a different topic associated with colonial times. It was a rough start, and I wish that I had created more of a base of websites that would be helpful to get information from. I did require the students to have at least 2 books as their sources and a few students ended up finding all their information from books. After 3-4 days on the computers, most of the students are either finished or almost finished with their PowerPoint slides. Throughout the week I took the time to look at their planning sheets and wrote down suggestions of specific topics for them to look up information on, which helped most of the students. Monday is our last day on the computers, so hopefully everyone will finish by then.

In language arts, we have been continuing our mystery unit with a read aloud of The View From the Cherry Tree. The first chapter was hard for the students to sit through, but every chapter after that is engaging and now the students don't want me to stop reading when I get to the end of the chapter. I'm also supplementing the unit with mystery picture books, 2-minute mysteries, and Encyclopedia Brown stories and the students will pull out the different mystery elements of the stories including the detective, the crime, the evidence (including red herrings), and the suspects (including the criminal). Reviewing each mystery element helps the students grasp the meaning of the words better.

Overall, I'm excited about how these units are shaping out and wish I could stay in the classroom longer. I don't really want to switch because the language arts unit will not be anywhere near completion by the time I switch rooms.