Week 1
My first week back in the classroom was better than I expected it to be. The first day I walked in, everybody had a smile on their face and I got many hugs from all of my kids. Mrs. Loftis let me jump right in and start leading morning work lessons. My nervousness from last semester quickly went away, and I started to act more like a teacher, instead of a friend. If the kids were talkative, I did the "5....4...3....2....1" technique. I told them that now I'm not taking it so easy on them, and that I have to prepare them for the EOGs. The students responded surprisingly well to this and started listening to me more.
Week 2
This week I slepped back a little bit and watched Mrs. Loftis teach. I helped students one on one if they needed it, but I wanted to get back into the mix of things because I felt like I jumped back in too fast. I learned that one of my students has been having some trouble at home, and he comes to school with different injuries every day. Mrs. Loftis started taking pictures of his injuries and reporting them to the nurse. Whenever he said something to me about it, I had to document it to prove that Mrs. Loftis wasn't the only one hearing these things. This case was eventually reported to DSS, and I haven't heard anything about it since.
Week 3
My kids had to do benchmark tests all this week. I answered any questions that they had before the test and had to make sure that they were prepared. This was probably the most stressful and hectic week of my teaching days at Oakwood. I was in charge of making sure that all of the kids were in the right testing zones. With kids being absent and running all around school, it was hard to settle everybody in and start testing every morning. Later in the week, Mrs. Loftis assigned me a group of 5 to work with individually, because they were struggling and needed extra help.
Week 4
I started doing warm ups with the kids this week. They were given paragraphs every morning, where they had to correct mistakes in them, and then show the parts of speech in the paragraph. They had trouble with this at first, but after a while, they seemed like experts! They loved doing these warm ups and seemed excited to start their day doing these. I also started them on doing handwriting worksheets. I started teaching elapsed time to them, and I did a clock activity with them for my lesson plan.
Week 5
My class worked extra hard on math this week. We gave them math tests every morning and math warm ups. Overall, my kids did well with this. One part of these tests had 2 digit subtraction and addition, where they had to regroup and borrow digits. Two of my girls did not understand this and failed their test. I spent three days out of this week with them, and did everything I could to help them understand it. I used blocks, games, and everything else I could to help. They seemed to understand it with me, so I figured they could try to retake the test. They proved me right! They both got 100s on their tests, and I was so proud of them!
Week 6
My last week with the kids was very sad. Mrs. Loftis had to leave for her surgery so the kids learned that they would have a substitute for the rest of the year. They didn't want me to go, and I think they probably felt abandoned since both, their teacher and their other "teacher" had to leave at the same time. Mrs. Loftis informed me that they made a present for me, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's something very sweet like them! I'm going to buy little cards and write messages to them. I'm going to give it to them when I go back for Fun Day to stay the whole day with them.
Week 1
My first week back in the classroom was better than I expected it to be. The first day I walked in, everybody had a smile on their face and I got many hugs from all of my kids. Mrs. Loftis let me jump right in and start leading morning work lessons. My nervousness from last semester quickly went away, and I started to act more like a teacher, instead of a friend. If the kids were talkative, I did the "5....4...3....2....1" technique. I told them that now I'm not taking it so easy on them, and that I have to prepare them for the EOGs. The students responded surprisingly well to this and started listening to me more.
Week 2
This week I slepped back a little bit and watched Mrs. Loftis teach. I helped students one on one if they needed it, but I wanted to get back into the mix of things because I felt like I jumped back in too fast. I learned that one of my students has been having some trouble at home, and he comes to school with different injuries every day. Mrs. Loftis started taking pictures of his injuries and reporting them to the nurse. Whenever he said something to me about it, I had to document it to prove that Mrs. Loftis wasn't the only one hearing these things. This case was eventually reported to DSS, and I haven't heard anything about it since.
Week 3
My kids had to do benchmark tests all this week. I answered any questions that they had before the test and had to make sure that they were prepared. This was probably the most stressful and hectic week of my teaching days at Oakwood. I was in charge of making sure that all of the kids were in the right testing zones. With kids being absent and running all around school, it was hard to settle everybody in and start testing every morning. Later in the week, Mrs. Loftis assigned me a group of 5 to work with individually, because they were struggling and needed extra help.
Week 4
I started doing warm ups with the kids this week. They were given paragraphs every morning, where they had to correct mistakes in them, and then show the parts of speech in the paragraph. They had trouble with this at first, but after a while, they seemed like experts! They loved doing these warm ups and seemed excited to start their day doing these. I also started them on doing handwriting worksheets. I started teaching elapsed time to them, and I did a clock activity with them for my lesson plan.
Week 5
My class worked extra hard on math this week. We gave them math tests every morning and math warm ups. Overall, my kids did well with this. One part of these tests had 2 digit subtraction and addition, where they had to regroup and borrow digits. Two of my girls did not understand this and failed their test. I spent three days out of this week with them, and did everything I could to help them understand it. I used blocks, games, and everything else I could to help. They seemed to understand it with me, so I figured they could try to retake the test. They proved me right! They both got 100s on their tests, and I was so proud of them!
Week 6
My last week with the kids was very sad. Mrs. Loftis had to leave for her surgery so the kids learned that they would have a substitute for the rest of the year. They didn't want me to go, and I think they probably felt abandoned since both, their teacher and their other "teacher" had to leave at the same time. Mrs. Loftis informed me that they made a present for me, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's something very sweet like them! I'm going to buy little cards and write messages to them. I'm going to give it to them when I go back for Fun Day to stay the whole day with them.