Week 16

This week was a good week!

Monday started out very well. I have been  noticing that Monday's are usually pretty good because they have had time to cool off and take a break from each other. By the end of the week the students are ready for another break and to do their own thing.

The biggest thing I learned this week was that when you're working in a school, you have to be flexible. I thought we had RTI this week, and we did on Tuesday, but none of the other days. No one was really sure what was going on and since RTI is right in the beginning of the day, we had to skip half of it before we figured out whether or not we actually had it. The reason why they are not having it is because of MAP testing, which our 5th graders will be doing next week. It is difficult when we do not know because that is a half hour of our day for which I did not have anything planned, only plans for our RTI group. On Monday, we read Zach's Lie, the novel we are reading together as a class. The rest of the days, we started by doing vocabulary for a novel we are going to be starting next week, and each student will have a copy.

My cooperating teacher taught me so much this week. She says you just have to go with whatever they tell you and have enough ideas and backup ideas to make it work. I think that is the hardest part of teaching for me. I am not really sure what I can do, or what I should do when we need to vary from the normal. She is really good at coming up with activities or time fillers that aren't meaningless. They always have a point and further student learning. I hope that I can be a teacher like that someday!

Something that I need to work on is classroom management. The students are good whenever the cooperating teacher is in the room, but as soon as she  leaves, they seem to go a little bit crazy. I think this is because when I started out, they were ok so I was a little bit relaxed with it. When my teacher needs to leave to help with another class or situation, then they think it's not so serious anymore and that they can do whatever. We talked in our class on Monday about this and it is so true! My teacher can be more relaxed with her students because they know they cannot mess around when she is in there. This lets her be more personable with them, but also to get them right back on track when the time comes.