Week 3 Blog Posting

This week has felt like the longest four days ever! I am starting to realize that my students are such zombies on Monday since they are tired from their weekend. I think that Monday’s seem like a good time for instruction since they are too quiet to disrupt their neighbor. I also have noticed that I am most tired on Monday as well and need to really step up. I took over morning work this week. My teacher suggested that I should teach morning work for two days and then she would take back over for a day so I could watch her one last time. I thought that this was a good idea. After the first two days of my teaching I reflected really well so I knew what to look for when she taught the third day. One of my main concerns was that I was not very upbeat. I felt like if I wanted m students to be excited about learning the information, then I needed to be excited about teaching it! The next days I tried to step it up. I find it hard early in the morning when I am really tired to get really engaged so that I engage my students. Although the week felt extremely long, I learned a lot this week. I have been trying to work more with my students’ one on one. Our students’ levels are really far apart. We have one student that cannot even recognize the first letter of their name and another student that is on a third grade reading level. This makes instruction very difficult. This week I started taking small groups during station time to work on leveled instruction. I found it difficult to decide what students needed what instruction. When my teacher reviewed my lesson plans she thought some activities were too low for some groups. I wonder if this comes with experience or if I do not know my students well enough. I made it a point this week to get to know my students and their strengths AND weaknesses better. I noticed that I tend to get better results from my students when working one on one with them. Well duh! I feel stupid for even writing that. I just am seeing how important it is to work to each individual needs. I find it very difficult to realize that many students are not getting this one on one interaction that they need. I feel like they could really be rising to their potential if we have the teacher man power. It is difficult to find one on one time with certain students. I wonder if we made a time every day where a teacher just pulled one student at a time to work on a specific need if we could make a faster learning process. I worked with our child that has behavior issues this week one on one. He was refusing to color his worksheet, which we needed to do before he could go play at stations. The student just sat there and watched all of the other children. The other teachers were busy either pulling students for individual teaching or busy supervising the other students in the room. I decided that I would sit down and talk to this student. This is a student who has really never been given the chance to color in his life. I talked to him about the different colors and what color he wanted to use for the different parts of the picture. As he told me what colors to use I would pick up the crayon and begin to color that section. I told him I started it now you need to finish it. He did very well with this activity. His coloring was the best we have ever seen it. Of course he would get distracted but he actually finished his work in time to play. I feel like because of his behavior issues we tend to leave him out or not think he needs help or deserves help but in reality he needs more help than anyone in that room.