Day 17: Loving 5th Grade

Today I could tell that I hadn't had enough sleep last night. My patience was thin and by lunch time, I was so frustrated with the students, with the little things that I can normally look past. But I did not get mad. I stayed calm and complete in control by thinking about the chocolate and peanut butter bar I had waiting for me at home.
Mrs. Stewart, the other 5th grade teacher, met me out at recess. She asked how I was dealing with the stress. I said pretty well.
"Is it more stressful than you thought it would be?"
"Yeah, but I also like it more than I thought I would."

For a while now I have been worried about older grades. I have worried that I wouldn't be able to understand or teach the content. I had decided I wanted to work with only with younger grades. But being in 5th grade... I love it! I love the older kids, the challenge of working them through problems. I do wish that I could help them fill the holes that have been there since 2nd grade, but I don't know how to do that yet.

I wonder how it would be to teach the same set of kids for  their entire school career. Then I could know that if there is a hole, it is my fault and maybe I would be able to know how to fix it. I would also know those kids and how they thought. That is how they do it in Norway. They teach 1-3 then go back to 1st, unless they want to go all the way up to 7th. Then they can. that would be both amazing and so difficult.

Okay, now onto my lessons.

I taught my Guided Reading today, and I thought it went better than the last two times I have done it. I was able to manage my time better, I payed attention to all of the students and what they were doing, and I also was able to better figure out what level my group was on so I could best help them.

During Writing, Mrs. Burton was observing me. I taught a lesson on sensory writing. I also made Magic Writing Pens. I told the students about my special pens that I had made.
"These pens make you write your best writing. When you write with them, everything you do is your best." You should have seen their eyes light up! They were so excited to use these pens (which are pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.) After I showed them the pens I taught them how to cross out while they were writing.
"These pens don't have an eraser. So you have to cross out." I gave and example of a good cross out and a bad cross out. I had them tell me why each was either good or bad.
I went through procedures of how to get our binders after recess, how to get their pens and where to put them until writing time. Then we had a Roller-Coaster Write.
A Roller-Coaster write is when you write for an amount of time, but you can't stop. Just like a Roller-Coaster, once you start you can't stop. I had to remind a few kids to keep going, but overall I think they enjoyed the analogy.
After the roller-coaster write I gave a mini lesson. I taught them to expand their sentences with sensory information. What does it look like, sound like, smell like, feel like, taste like? The example I used went with the write we had done. The kids had created their own fairy godmother. These are the sentences that I started out with and eventually ended up with.

She had a pink dress.
She had a sparkly pink dress.
She had a pink dress that sparkled and shimmered.
She had a beautiful pink dress the sparkled and shimmered marvelously.

They had to tell me what they saw, then use some big words. After we did this together I told them to pick one sentence from their Roller Coaster write and expand it using sensory images. They had to make me see it.  When I told them we were going to share tomorrow, they were so disappointed. But I was out of time.

Overall, I thought the lesson went really well, much better than my first one. I thought I did a good job laying out what to do (at least better than before) and getting them excited to write. All of them were writing! I remember my writing teacher telling us that kids will learn to love writing if they get to do it every day. If they can only do it twice a week, they will hate it.
I want to make sure that when I give them a task to do I give them one minute to think, they can't write, just think. Then give them the time to write. I also wish I had more time!

Mrs. Burton gave me these observations:
Strengths:

• Very explicit instructions and expectations
• Lesson was organized and well thought out making it easy for students to succeed
• Transitions were smooth, quick, and precise.

These were all things she had asked me to improve on, and I was very glad that I did!
Improvement:

• Watch for off task behaviors and redirect students to get more engagement.
• Don't be afraid to reward and punish

She suggested that next time I teach I give 5 rewards and 5 punishments.
As I continue to teach I am realizing that it is a whole ton of multi-tasking! That is what teaching is, and has to be, if the students are going to learn.

Day 16: Writing Magic

I am going to need to work on my classroom management. The kids will listen to me but it is not the same way that they listen to Mrs. Burton. I think I am going to need to be a little bit more strict with them.

I didn't get to do my writing lesson today, but I did get to see Mrs. Burton do a pre write, or a roller coaster write. It is where you do nothing but write for a few minutes. Then she had the kids share what they had written with their table. I made some "Magic Writing Pens" today. They are just regular pens that are a little bit fancy. When I give them to the kids I will tell them "These pens make your writing good whenever you use them." It will also solve the problem of them erasing. I am going to need to teach them that when they make a mistake, they have to put a single line through it and move on. This will also help them with their math timings I think. A lot of them are still erasing or scribbling out their answer. Just a line does it.

Tomorrow I am going to do my writing lesson, and it is going to be a mini lesson on using sensory words. For example: Their sentence could be "She saw the blue sky." We know exactly what happened, but we can't feel it, we can't see it in our mind, there is nothing to describe it. So I will teach it in two steps. Let's add some describing words. "She glanced up and looked at the sky, blue as the ocean." This is more interesting to read and begins to paint a picture with words. "She glanced up into the sapphire expanse that unfolded above her. " Much more descriptive and give a better image for the mind to imagine. I hope they will get it. I am only going to have them do it to one sentence.  Maybe I should call it expanding their sentence...