First week teaching!

I have enjoyed my first week in the first grade class. My teacher has given me many wonderful ideas about how to keep the students in small groups and switch the activities after 15-20 minutes because of the little ones and their attention spans. She has guided reading groups every day and they are connected in pairs. What I mean by this is on Monday the students will be introduced to a new book. They will look through at the title and make predictions, look at the pictures and alter their predictions, read the story and discuss characters, setting and plot, and then do a retelling with comprehension questions. On Tuesday the students will have an activity that goes along with the book on Monday. Some of the activities I have seen so far involve the students completing a cloze representation of the book where they have to re-read it in order to find the missing words, putting pictures from the story in order of events while also matching the sentences that go with each picture, and question sheets that have the students making inferences about situations in the story and also asking detail questions (what happened to the race car in the story? He got stuck in the mud). I have already put many of these ideas in my teaching book. Because I have gone from teaching 3rd grade for about a year and a half into teaching 1st grade I have a lot to learn and I am soaking up as much as I can before I teach my first whole group lessons.

I am getting a great experience because I have two mentor teachers. One teacher is on Monday through Thursday and the second is on Friday. They have similar teaching styles but yet they are two very different teachers. They have worked out a system for teaching maths, history, and art that works for them. And it seems to be working for the students. They communicate about student behavior and progress as well as lesson plans that need to be done differently than originally planned.

One thing that is new to me are the amount of meetings the teachers go to each week. There are at least two meetings my teacher attends each week. Some are for committees she is on, but there is one on Wednesday afternoons that cycles between grade level and whole school. It's wonderful to see that the school is working for constant communication so everyone is aware of what is happening. Each meeting has updates on a range of things. The first whole school meeting I attended discussed the behavior intervention plan that the school is just starting to implement, updates from the library, and a reminder that the literacy coach on staff would love to meet with everyone to put literacy plans together and discuss more effective ways of teaching vocabulary.

My second day in the classroom I was asked to teach the students the tooti-ta as a representation for a growing pattern. What I didn't know was that I was actually teaching it to two classes (about 50 five/six/seven year olds) and that the principal would want to see it. Talk about taking some initiative right away! The kids loved the song and had a whole lot of fun learning it, the principal also enjoyed it :) For the most part my involvement in the classroom was working in small groups with the students which was most of the day and it allowed me to get to know them better. By the end of the week I had taken over maths and was teaching the students about skip counting by tens and ways to show them with counters and unifix cubes.

Unrelated to teaching, but we also went to the Chermside mall. Half the size of the Mall of America, maybe? less? Still, it was big and my feet were killing me when I got home. I felt pretty silly at one point because I was starving and ordered some food... and my card was denied three times. I just looked at my companions and said, "will someone please pay for my meal? I will get money out of the ATM as soon as we're done eating." Thankfully one of the QUT students offered to pay for it so I didn't have to delete the order, get money, stand in the long line again just to re-order and pay for it. Saved me some time. I saw a lot of really cool stores and bought lots of good presents and souvenirs for family and friends. Also purchased myself an amazing pair of thongs (flip flops/sandals) because my walks to school and back were taking a toll on my poor heels. I had blisters everywhere and they were starting to pop and re-blister. Yeah--ew is right. And they HURT!! So the flip flops were to be used at the beaches and walking back and forth to school.

Speaking of beaches... my second weekend was amazing! :)