handwritten on February 19, 2015
For thirty to forty minutes every morning, I am required to teach "vocabulary" to a group of 26 8th grade students. Challenging? Yes. Particularly because we are supposed to stay on the same ten words for at least 7 or 8 days. Early on, I decided that this was no longer just going to be a vocabulary class but this was going to be a "thinking space." It was going to be a 30-minute period where some way, some how, I talked about this vocabulary using the context of the world. This month is black history month and so I have been creating a series of culturally relevant lessons that deal wtih issues in America. One of my words this week was "hypocrisy." I made this statement:
We have freedom...
handwritten on February 12, 2015
I have not yet written about this particular semester. In some cases, I think the lack of writing has not been because I have nothing to say. Rather, it is because I am not quite sure how to say what I want to say. This semester has been extremely challenging in the sense that I am not longer dealing with elementary school students. Rather, I am dealing with middle schoolers who are not always interested in what you are talking about and come from broken homes and unimaginable poverty. Just today, I had one of my most ineresting teacher moments. I had planned for our intervention vocabulary lesson to conduct a game of Bingo with my students. Only two minutes into setting up the game did I...
handwritten on December 15, 2014
I did want to take some time to reflect upon my experience differentiating instruction for my students this semester. I always joke around with my classmates about this topic of differentiation. During my college courses, we were always told to differentiate instruction because this is how to make differences in the academic lives of many of your students rather than just targeting a single student. However, the word differentiation is so easy to say. The actual act of providing differentation is what is difficult.
I was lucky during my second grade experience in the sense that I had students from a variety of different backgrounds. Thus, differentiation was a part of my...
handwritten on December 12, 2014
It certainly has been a while since I have had the opportunity to blog about my second grade experience. The past three weeks I have been taking over full-time in the second grade classroom. Luckily, my mentor teacher set this experience up in such a way that I was completely ready to take over the classroom when it was my turn to do so! During my third takeover week, I had the opportunity to conduct a small, yet "fun" writing piece with my students. I decided to create a prompt that had to do with the huge snowstorm Buffalo, New York experienced during the middle of November. I showed a small news clip that demonstrated how high "8 feet of snow" would look like in the classroom. The...
handwritten on December 8, 2014
Durng the past few weeks, I begin teaching double-digit addition with my second graders. With the Common Core Curriculum, teaching double-digit has become much more challenging. Students no longer have to just memorize the procedure (as I did in school) but they must understand the concept behind the procedure. Needless to say, I found this unit rewarding but challenging to teach in some ways. Before allowing the students to solve the problem procedurally, I required the students to solve the problem using base ten blocks. We used the following steps to complete our problems.
1. Add your ones together
2. Ask yourself: Can I make a group of ten with my ones? If yes-regroup! If no-move on to...
