Week 3; day 1

Today seemed to be a long day. It wasn’t long in the sense of taking forever, but my allergies had kicked it, and they just wore me out. It seemed to be hard to walk up steps without having my breath taken away, I couldn’t smell, nothing. It just seemed to be a really hard time.

Other than that, the day in my opinion seemed to go very well. I started doing the morning opening today, and was able to get that figured out, and roaring to go. I’m excited to do this, as well as the end of the day preparation/getting things ready for when they leave. Students are doing well with finding the patterns in their opening; I am quite surprised, and am ready to possibly throw a new pattern into the mix. They are also doing fairly well with the money, but we haven’t done a whole lot being that they only moved/changed money once. Hopefully they will move money again on Wednesday.
I also taught handwriting and daily math. I think that these are going very well. I was asked for daily math to keep it under 10 minutes, and I did that. I thought it went really well, and students did a great job understanding the math. When I corrected the workbooks at the end of the day after the students left, there were only a few who needed to make corrections; either they really got it, or they just understood what was going on. The math problems in my eyes are not that hard, but I am also a 22 (almost 23) year old college student who has always been very good at math, so that could be why. The problems were ones such as 5+6=11, and 9-5=4. There were a few different students who needed a little extra help, but we didn’t even take the 10 minutes (or we went a little over and we weren’t told that it went over. We also discussed a few of the math problems that Miss M said 3rd graders had problems with, and those problems are ones such as __=4+5, or 2+3=___+4. Spending time on those, it seems as though students either get it and understand that is still going to be the same answer if it were written the right way, and that the problems just have to have answers that equal themselves (man that is hard to explain in writing). I have a feeling that it is going to take some time in order for the students to understand these concepts, but I will work on it and see if I can get them to understand and work on these and have them down. Miss M said that they were on tests, and that no matter how much she tried last year, she could not get the students to understand the concept so they actually got them wrong on the test.
During social studies time, some students were pulled out to go work with Title I teachers. The students then didn’t have any social studies time because they were down in the Title rooms working on Math. I’m not 100% sure that is the right choice, because I really do feel that students should be working on math but they should be getting social studies time as well. I have a hard time with upper-grade levels and “teaching to the test”. I have heard it so many times that it almost makes me want to barf. I feel that social studies (although it isn’t quite as important as math) is a subject that students should have knowledge on especially since they were learning today about maps (North and South Pole, the Equator, the continents, and the oceans). I feel that those things are extremely important as an adult, and if students are being pulled out at an early age, when learning about things such as maps that is something they will use in real life.
Today I also followed JL to the Special Ed teacher’s room, Mrs. S. While watching her, I realized how patiently she worked with JL, and what she was doing. She was working with words, and their sounds/blends. She used cubes, and had each sound have its own cube, and then would change a sound, and the block that the sound changed a new block would have to be moved into its place. I really thought it was interesting how she worked with the students. I’m glad I took the opportunity (or had to, this wasn’t my first Special Ed classroom experience, but its still nice to see).