Student Teaching Week 10

This week went much better than last week because my health was finally back in order. Since Halloween was on Saturday, my lessons for the week tied a lot around that theme. We had a lot of Halloween book read alouds, the students created their own Halloween books, and they completed a journal on what they were going to dress up as. I think that the students definitely see me as their teacher, rather than just a student teacher; however, they are still a little talkative at times when I'm teaching whole group. This is also due to them being 5 and 6 year olds! I am definitely getting much more used to the flow of the lesson plans, and it is becoming easier and easier to plan for the entire week. I have also developed a greater sense to timing and if students aren't ready for a certain lesson or activity I may have planned for them. The students learned the initial sound /s/ this week, and I had a lot of fun incorporating that into almost everything we did throughout the day. I also started sending home a weekly parent letter this week to inform parents of concepts we are working on and how they can practice these with their children at home.

On Thursday, I stayed after school to help with the Authurdale Service Club at Valley. The two head teachers of the club were past mentor teachers of mine, so I felt very comfortable at the meeting. I helped the students create treat bags that would be passed out during trick or treating at the Authurdale Historical Building. It was nice to work with an older group of students and to help them out at the club meeting. I definitely want to attend more in the future.

My action research this week went well. I decided to play a game on Monday and Tuesday called Roll-Say-Keep with the students. On the game board, there are six spaces and in the top left corner of each space is one side of a die (i.e. one dot to stand to represent the first space, two dots to represent the second space, and so on). Using the game board and a stack of note cards with lowercase and uppercase letters, you place one card, face up, on each space, leaving the remaining cards in a pile. The student take turns rolling the die, and identifying the letter in the corresponding space. If the student could identify the letter, they get to keep the card. If he or she couldn't, I would tell them to "phone their friends" and get the answer. Thus, they still got to keep the card. The students loved this game, and it was great because they got lots of exposure to the letters. To tie it in with Halloween and the initial sounds, /s/, I mixed in cards with spiders on them. If the student rolled and got those cards, they had to say the sound they heard at the beginning of spider. I made a big production out of the spiders, so they all tried to roll the number to get the spider cards.

The students had RTI Wednesday morning, so I was not able to pull my AR group of students on that day. On Thursday, I just pulled all five out of their playtime together and used the Fishing Pole Game as incentive. Since I know they love the fishing poles, I figured it would reduce their behaviors and they could just take turns. The students did a good job cooperating, and they helped each other out when one of them didn't know the letter. Since they were sitting in a circle, it was easier for them to see all of the letters, and get more exposure to them. During both activities, I've continued to notice that a lot of the students relate letters to the names of their classroom peers. I plan to use this method more next week to see if learning how to spell their classmates names helps their recognition.

To assess them on Friday, I did the usual flashcards I've been using. This time, I got the students much more involved with the sheets I circled the letters they knew, and brought out the "Letter Stars" poster. If they had three circles around a letter, they were allowed to put a star sticker by that letter on the poster. I had them find which letters they had three circles, and let them pick out the color star they wanted to designate as their color. We counted how many new letters that had circled, and they all showed excitement about the poster and the stickers. I am hoping that this type of reinforcement will encourage them to try harder and practice more with letters. Next week, I plan to do more kinesthetic types of activities with the students to make them more aware of letter formation.