Field Experience Week 2

What?

This is our second week of field and it has been a great learning experience for me. I LOVE being in the classroom! It's exciting and great to see the students actually learning and retaining what we are teaching them. We have a great cooperating teacher that is teaching us a ton including things that we want to do like her and things that we don't want to do like her.

So What?

Our class of sixth graders is teaching us as we are teaching them. I feel like every minute I am there I am learning something new from them. Many of the things that I learn from them have to do with classroom management. I think that our cooperating teacher is great but there are a few things that she does that I don't like. She is a yeller. Her students don't listen to her unless she is yelling. She also likes to publicly embarrass the students which I totally disagree with. I think that she feels that if she does it, they will stop misbehaving but usually it backfires. Sarah-Jane and I try to find ways to get the students to pay attention by using other ways. So far, it seems to be working well. The students seem to behave better when they are treated with respect knowing that we expect the same in return.

Our teacher has taught some awesome lessons that I want to do when I teach. She did one where she taught the students about the moon phases. She used a big light that was like the sun and Styrofoam balls on popsicle sticks and they turned around using their head as the earth. It was really cool and the students understood it. I wrote the experiment down so that I can use it for my future classes.

Now What?

We have one more week in this classroom. I hope to use every second to learn more. Our cooperating teacher is sharing lots of ideas with us and giving us lots of hints on what we can do to improve our teaching. This week we will teach five more times and we will help the students understand WWII. There is so much information though that I am not sure we will be able to get through it all. I am so excited to teach this topic to these great sixth graders!