Memories of Week One

My fourth grade class has twenty-six students with thirteen boys and girls. There are six students that need extra support from special education. As a result, a paraprofessional is in the classroom practically the whole day. It is sure nice to have an extra adult in the room to help with these students.

I feel very fortunate to be with a team of four teachers that support and work together to get things completed. They share curriculum and materials to make the workload a little less cumbersome. The school district has done a lot to give teachers resources to use in lesson planning, and these resources are available right online. This makes it a lot easier to do some planning at home.

The school climate seems overall positive. Like most schools, teachers seem to stick with their teams. Each grade has a different lunch period, and this is the time when adults can connect on a personal level. After or before school, teachers are busy getting ready for their school day, and there is always an abundance of work and not enough time to get it all done. I suppose teachers learn to pace themselves and take things off the list as they are completed. They live with the motto "What doesn't get done today, can wait until tomorrow!"

Something memorable about my first week would have to be the mini unit on Monarchs. Monarch eggs were bought from the local college, and pairs of students take care of the Monarchs by feeding them and cleaning out their temporary homes. The students get to see first hand life science in the classroom. They learn new vocabulary, see the lifecycle, and record observations. This unit is interactive, and it has the potential to be memorable for the students. I know I will remember it long after my student teaching experience.

Now that my first week is completed, I am surprised at the amount of work that goes into making the day run smoothly and how fast the day feels. It is hard to get all the subjects into each day and even each week. Part of this struggle is because it was the first week of school, and the routines needed to be established. Setting up these routines takes double the amount of time, and they need to be reviewed until they become natural.

Something else that surprised me had to do with the read-a-loud portion of the day. I was going to take this over on day one, but my cooperating teacher called me over Labor Day weekend to tell me she changed her mind. She wanted to do this for a few days first. Her reason was that everything that happens in the day was a learning experience for myself. After observing her leading the read-a-loud, I was glad she didn't have me do this right away in the first week. As she read, she practiced many high level-reading techniques with the students like predicting what would happen next. I didn't realize that even read-a-loud look a little preparation and thinking before it happened.

I am excited for week two to begin. I will get to take on more responsibility, and learn even more about how to be an effective teacher. Hopefully, I can manage to get a majority of my ideas into practice while I am student teaching. If not, I know that "What doesn't get done today, can wait until tomorrow!"