Better late than never

Sorry for the delay. Last week was incredibly busy. I had both 3rd grade sections, 5th grade, and spent a lot of time planning for this week (a short, but busy week) and started wrapping up a few things for student teaching, since my time is rapidly coming to an end here.

Monday started with vocabulary with the 5th graders. Every Thursday, the ESL teacher meets with the SST (special services teacher) and mainstream 5th grade teacher to plan for the reading classes the following week. I obviously attend these meetings and have been pitching ideas and intro activities. For this past week, I suggested giving the kids an activity where they have to draw out the word. After many questions and a lot of collaboration (top 3 favorite parts of the ESL/SST program here), this is the final activity planned:
The students get exposure to the words with images and definitions (they always get introduced in this sense at some point in the intro lesson). Then, the students are read a short story, written by the ESL teacher, that includes the vocab words in a different context than the class book (Mr. Popper's Penguins). The students are then paired off and assigned a single word/portion of the story to draw. They are given the rest of the class to do so. The following class period, we read the story again, and the students held up their picture that depicted a portion of the story/their word. The pictures were creative, hilarious, and pretty accurate. It was so fun to tap into the drawing skills of some of the students and the creativity in all of them. Their personalities were definitely evident through their drawings... I loved it, and the students seemed to as well-- or at least they were great sports.

In 3rd grade, we introduced the first half of a story called "Ribsy and the Roast." With this, we only introduced half of the vocab words. I started by reading a short summary that included all of the vocab words, flipping through a powerpoint with a picture depicting the vocab word as I read it. After 2 read-throughs of the summary, the students were each given a card with a vocab word on it. We then proceeded to do a Mix/Freeze/Group activity, where the students walk around, looking at each others' words, get into groups, talk about their words, switch words, and repeat several times. I have seen this activity a few times in my experience  here, and I love how the students interact with each other and play with definitions/descriptions of words. After the students finished the activity, they sat back down, and I asked them to share their definitions/ideas before showing them the correct one. The students did great!

On Tuesday, I worked with the ESL students to read the first half of the story. I had the students take turns reading (I read some to model and to save us some time for the comprehension activity/questions I had planned). As we read, I stopped to clarify some words/phrases and to do comprehension checks. I created a 4-corner book for the students to write down the 4 main ideas from the reading. They could use this later to study for their assessment on Friday. The students did really well with talking out the details/important parts of the story, and they loved that I was filling out one of the 4-corner books with them.

Wednesday/Thursday are center days-- students split into guided reading groups and complete a variety of stations for spelling/bible/vocab/reading. I had this brilliant activity plan, where the students would work in partners to read the summary, then without referring to the text, sequence the words and re-tell the story. They would be able to refer to the pictures (already in order) and the text in rare circumstances, but I really wanted them to challenge themselves. Unfortunately 20 seconds into the first class (the one that I barely observe and don't know the names of more than 5 students), one of the boys informed me he didn't like his partner. I asked him to please work with his partner, and very soon realized that these two boys definitely could not work together. Without missing a beat, I accommodated  as I saw the other pair of boys struggling with the activity as well. The second group came to my station and I was well-prepared to make proper adjustments, resulting in a much more smoothly ran activity.
Thursday I did the same lesson (with proper accommodations) with the 3rd grade class I have been with since day 1 and felt so much more confident in my execution and my students' preparation for the test. However, because I knew the students in the first section didn't receive the full practice I wanted for them on Wednesday, I created a study sheet for them to help them practice even more for the test.

All in all, the week was great. I am falling so in love with these students and can hardly imagine leaving them in 2 weeks. I'd like to think that the thought of it breaking my heart is a bit of an exaggeration, but I really don't think it is. Who would have imagined me falling in love with teaching elementary/junior high kids? I know I sure didn't.