Monday morning, I took the lead in teaching my students how to apply the proofreading strategy C.H.I.M.P.S. to their writing. For about 15 minutes, I read through the model I had written and the students offered correction that needed to be made. My CT was able to chime in throughout the lesson, and provided me with helpful feedback we discussed the following day. All in all, I felt it was a successful lesson.
That afternoon in my Literacy course I met with my PLC for the first time. The PLCs were put together based on our inquiry student’s specific needs and I loved being able to collaborate and strategize with my classmates who shared the same goal. My particular focus for my inquiry student is vocabulary and comprehension. In the PLC my group discussed Laura S. Pardo’s article “What every teacher needs to know about comprehension”. Many of the ideas in the article, like how new information is built through making connections to prior knowledge, is something that has come up in my other courses.
For example, in my Child Development course covered Piaget and Vygotsky’s cognitive theories of Constructivism where an individual either builds knowledge through experience or through interactions with others, respectively. This relates to early literacy especially because of the push for parents to read to their children. This value however, as we have in discussed in ESOL I in previous weeks, is not universal amongst all cultures. To reach this goal while still being respectful of a student’s background, a teacher would need to provide reading materials that relate to their culture or can be shared in a manner that the family finds valuable.
On Wednesday, my classmates Stacy, Nicole and I led a morning meeting for our Classroom Management course. After a few weeks of exchanging ideas, we decided on a Halloween themed activity that could be used in the classroom; we called in the Mummy Mix-Up. This game was a twist on the traditional toilet paper mummy wrap game, however within the toilet paper roll were slips of paper with words on them. As the paper was unrolled, the members of the team had to arrange the words into a “spooky saying” to win. I think the added challenge made the morning meeting extra fun, and the slips could easily be replaced with letters or math facts if we were to do the activity in the elementary classroom.
Because the instructors of my Thursday classes were all out of town, I took the opportunity to spend the whole school day with my CT’s class. Having been accustomed to my usual morning routine of helping with shared and independent reading, I was excited to see the mysterious subjects of math and science. What seemed to be most surprising, however, were the attitudes of the students. Rarely ever seeing them past their 10:30 lunchtime, I wasn’t expecting to see such a mixed reaction. Many of the students who show up to school sleepy and slow moving had perked up and became chattier. Others, who need redirection even the morning, became even more unfocused after running around at PE. And of course there were the few whose perseverance could put my attention span to shame.
I look forward to more weeks like these because it gives me a chance to see my students and CT in a new light.