Day 31: Time Will Tell

Well my students took the heredity test today. Only three people got 100%, and my the percentage of students over 80% was only 70% of my students. For tier one instruction that number is supposed to be 80% . Good news, I get to teach it again. I get to teach Mrs. Stewart's class and hopefully I can help them understand it better. This will make it much easier for me to gauge myself on how well I can improve. I will have to ask Mrs. Burton to send me the scores because I will not be here when the students take the test. By here, I mean America.

I expect I will be getting my hiking boots for Norway anyday now. And I will be getting some questions answered so that I can plan. I am excited for my first year (and the consecutive years after that) to know what it is I need to prepare so that I can start planning before hand. I read a well written article about one teacher who started planning in the summer and did a broad year long plan, then a month to month plan, and finally a week by week plan. I hope I can get to that eventually.

My cooperating teacher gave me a wonderful compliment yesterday and another one today. She told her husband that she didn't mind taking a day off while I was here because she knew everything would be taken care of. And today, she told me she was talking with the principal and told her that they needed me in their school. She also offered to give me a good word to the principal's and assistant principal's of some schools back where my family lives. I am sure my mom would love that. We'll see what happens.

I still don't know where I will be teaching come January. But I feel that that is to be expected. I need to start looking for jobs soon, but The ones that I really want, the full time teaching jobs, may not be available until closer to January.

Things to do in my first year

In my desk: tweezers, band-aids, scissors, rulers, hair ties, bobby pins, thumb tacks, basically a McGyver kit.  

Day 25: This is Science

Alright. I have now had a day where I know why I love teaching. Everything didn't go the way I wanted it to, but the kids loved the learning we did today.
During science, we played a game where they had to put the traits into Learned Behaviors or Inherited Traits. When I told them to put the science stuff away, they gaped at me.
"This is science?"
"Yep," I said. "This is science."
"But that was fun!"
They really enjoyed what we did! Now I just need to find a way to make the rest of the time, just as fun! But different. I don't want to do the same things every day.

Day 24: Genes or Jeans?

Heredity... is not an easy thing to teach. And I need to discover a way to make it more interesting. I planned for a bunch of stuff today, took some out, and now I realize that I need to take out even more! We didn't get to half of the vocab words that I wanted to get to today. Maybe I should just have them up and they kids write them down at the beginning. Then mark everytime we use the words in our discussions. That may be a much better idea than what I was doing. I think I will try that tomorrow.

Mrs. Burton left the classroom during math today without telling me, on purpose. She wanted to see how I would handle the classroom. Overall I thought it went well, the noise level was good, the kids all got their work done. I didn't do a very good job of looking over the class as I was helping individual kids, but I can get better at that.

A pretty good day today, I learned that having too much to teach is better than too little, so long as you can prioritize.

Things to do my first year:

Decide how much noise I want in my room

If I am going to do transitions to music, what songs am I going to choose? Will it depend on the grade I am in?