Student Teaching Week 8

This week, I was able to be a lot more involved in the classroom. I taught a mixture of Mrs. Sausen's lessons as well as my own lessons. I was also able to accompany the students on a field trip to the Fire Station on Monday, which was a lot of fun. It felt great to be in front of the class and to be working with all of the students versus just a small group. This gave me a chance to get a feel for the rountine of the lesson plans, and allowed me to become familiar with the basal and vocabulary book since I haven't written those lessons yet. I feel a lot more comfortable with reinforcing behaviors and the students are listening to me as if I was their own teacher. I have gotten to know a lot of them a lot better throughout the week and I can pick up on behavior issues and things that tend to set them off.

I spent a lot of the week preparing for my action research study, which I plan on implementing at the beginning of next week. I haven't decided if I want to collect data on all of the students, or just a small group, but I figure I will get a better idea once I start. I have gathered a lot of different activities, games, and my assessments and feel pretty confident to begin. The one factor I am worried about is time management. Since I am going to be doing short activities throughout the day, I am worried that I will end up skipping a lot of them because of lack of time.

Another worry I am having is my choice of activities. It's very hard to tell if students will love or be bored with an activity. I feel that the first week or two of my study, I will have to weed out the activities they dislike, and repeat the ones they like. I can find variations to those activities to use as well.