Student Teacher Week 9

This past week was a bit frustrating for me because I was sick. Towards the end of the week, I lost my voice and the students could barely understand what I said. Apart from that, the week went well. I started implementing my action research on Monday and throughout the week I had to make a lot of changes to accomodate the students and the times that were available to do activities.

On Monday, I set out the Wikistix one of the tables during free play. At first, the students enjoyed the Wikistix; however, the glamour of them soon wore off and the students quit using them to actually make letters. They began sticking all of the stix together and ignoring the letter cards. I tried not to intervene as much as I could because I wanted them to use a form of "self-discovery" when using the Wikistix. The other problem was that the students weren't saying the letter name as I could they would be, they were just silently doing the acitivity. Eventually, they stopped playing with the stix totally and went back to their puzzles. I had the wikistix out again in the afternoon as an alternate activity when they finished their work at quiet table. Although there were other choices, a few of the students played with them and used them correctly. Higher level students were saying the letter name and looking for specific letters in the pile of cards. Another thing I did together was put the magnetic letters up on the board. In called each student up during their free play and had them pick a certain letter. This took a lot longer than I expected, and didn't do much good considering they only had to find one letter. I didn't have as much time before bathrooms and transitions, so my whole plan of doing short activities during those times failed immensely.

On Tuesday, I changed things up a little and decided to pick two lower level students to do the "Fishing For Letters" activity. This activity worked well, especially with only two students, because I could prompt them to say the letter at first, and then they eventually just said it on cue when they "caught" a letter. All of the other students were in awe of the activity, so I decided to put it out during groups so everyone could have a chance to play with it. There are only four poles, so I told them that only four people could play at a time. The student responses to the activity varied. Some students would independently say the letter they caught without any prompting, while others just tried to catch as many letters as possible. I walked over a few times when students at my table were busy working and prompted them to say the letters, but I couldn't supervise the entire time. I also set the wikistix out at a table, and some students would chose to sit there if there was no room for them at the fishing site.

On Wednesday, I had decided that I was going to focus on a small group for my AR rather than the entire class. Since Tuesday's morning activity went much better than Mondays, I decided that maybe just focusing on a small number of students that need the entra help with letter recognition would be better than trying to focus on the entire class of 21 students. Also, when I went through my baseline scores, I realized that there was a significant difference in the majority of students that knew over three-fourths of their letters versus the minority of students that knew less than ten. These five students are all in RTI Tier II, so I decided that they would benefit most from the extra help. I decided to do an activity with playdoh and letter stamps with those students during the free play time in the morning. The students were a little confused at why they were sitting at the table, but once they started playing with the playdoh, they weren't too distracted anymore. At first, I had to prompt the students to tell me the letter they were stamping, but eventually a few of them started to say what letter they were using. I've noticed that the students' have a difficult time staying on task for more than 15-20 minutes when doing these activities, and when it passes that time limit, they just start messing around with the manipulatives rather than using them for their assigned purpose.

On Thursday, I had decided to pull the five students out to the hall at a table to do the activity I had planned. I got the idea from a Dr. Jean Reading book to glue dotted letters onto the unlined side of notecards. Since the glue basically dries clear, the students couldn't tell what the letters were. I had them do crayon rubbings and told them they were mystery letters, and they had to feel first and guess what the letter was, and then use the crayon to rub on a sheet of paper over the letter to find out what it really was. It was a little difficult to do this activity with five of them at once, especially because two of the students were late coming to the classroom because of breakfast so they didn't hear the directions. At first, they seemed to enjoy guessing the letters and called them out when they were finished with the rubbing. After about five minutes, they just started picking different letters and rubbing the crayon too hard to even see the outline of the letter. I also had to prompt them to identify the letters for me, instead of them just calling them out, like before. I do think they enjoyed this activity, but it would be better to do with a smaller amount of student at one time.

On Friday, I spent the morning giving the students their weekly assessments. I was happy to see that they were all able to recognize more letters than they did when I took my baseline data. I also noticed that they were all able to recognize the letters they had been learning the sounds to during their comprehension story, which included Aa, Tt, and Mm. From this, I can see that there is a strong correlation between letter recognition and letter sounds.

Next week, I plan to continue working with my small groups during that small chunk of time in the morning when they have free play. I may decide to only work with a few of the students at a time on certain days, so they don't entirely miss out on that social time with their peers. I have written all of the lesson plans for the week, and I am excited about teaching full-time. My main concern is keeping the students' behaviors under control. The school already has a behavior plan set for kindergarten, so I have been doing my best to implement it. The students are still getting used to me being their teacher, so they are still setting their boundaries to see how far I will let them go. I know that I am going to have to crack down on some of the students that act out a lot to set an example of what kind of teacher I am. It's going to be rough, but I can do it!