Day 11: Things to Consider

What does being On Task mean? My teacher has a video she found that explicitly explains how to be On Task. But when should I introduce this to my students? The first day and then reteach it as needed.

What are the differences between 5th and 2nd grade? The last classroom I was in was 2nd grade. I do have to remember that the teacher I was with was intimidating and had a completely different teaching style than I would ever want. She was not very organized and did things that she had been doing for the last 20 years. Sometimes those things work, but with other things... it is time for a change. As I have been in this 5th grade classroom I have realized... there is not a whole lot of difference. When I ask for deeper thinking I still get blank looks. When I expect something it normally gets done. When I ask for attention, no one looks at me. The attention getters like "One, two three, eyes on me!" "One two! Eyes on you!" I think that would work so well with this class, as long as I taught them explicitly how it worked. "When I say 'one, two, three, eyes on me.' You freeze and find me in the room while you are saying 'one, two! Eyes on you!' "Then make them practice it over and over and over. Maybe that is what this class needs. They need to know we are serious about doing things right the first time. Mrs. Burton is very strict, sometimes I am amazed at how strict she is, but maybe she is not strict enough? At least right now. Maybe sticking them to the little procedural things today would make it easier tomorrow. But then again, she has been doing this a long time. I'll think on that some more.

At every school I have ever taught at or attended, if the work is not done, the student stays in for recess until it is done. I strongly disagree with that. These are children. They aren't made to sit still for 5 hours with one 30 minute break and one 5-10 minute break. No wonder these poor fifth graders can't focus in the afternoon! Today we gave them a 20 minute recess and made them run two laps around the grass. Those kids can run, and they needed to get their heart rates up. I know that unstructured play time in necessary, however I also think that these 5th graders might not actually get moving without me telling them to do some sort of activity.
So, it is now established that children need to move. But if they can't stay in from recess, then when else do they get their work done? There is not enough time in the day, there is not always someone at home who is going to help them do their homework, and many times those students who don't get their work done are having trouble at home and can't get their homework done there anyway. So when?

When do I reteach? If there is not enough time in the day for regular things, how do I put MORE things into it!

Day 9: Things to Think About

As I was at school today I was thinking of some things that I want in my classroom that I have never thought about.

• When do I want to make copies?
• What do I want to do for birthdays? Summer birthdays?
• How do I want to hand back work that needs to be corrected?
• How do I want to communicated with parents?
• How will I create and keep relationships with other teachers.
• When and how will I reteach things that I didn't teach well, or the students didn't grasp well the first time?

These are some of the things that I have seen or not seen my teacher do that I have been thinking about.

Day 8: The Next Three Years

Well, today I experience what I have been told will be my life for the first three years I teach. I went through school sick. I was fine this morning, got to school, and then BAM! It hit like a wall. My nose went runny, my throat hurt, my head hurt, my body was tired. But I still smiled and did everything I needed to do. That is going to be so great!

We also had our first inside recess today, and I realized I never thought of what we would do during inside recess. So my teacher said she has procedures for inside recess, and they followed them very well.  But what am I going to do for inside recess? She has board games, VHS and puzzles. They are not allowed to do electronics (though VHS is too old school to be electronic) and can't be super loud while they are inside. Inside recess does happen often, so it is good to know what I want to do.

In the morning all of the students have morning work, and they have to check in with Mrs. Burton. This takes a long time, and if they don't do their morning work in line, then they don't get it done. But today she explained to me why she does it in the first place. She loves to get to talk with each student every morning. Some students can slip under your radar just because they are so quiet. Doing it this way she makes sure that she speaks with everyone. I don't know if that system would work for me, but I do want to find a way to speak with every student every day.

Day Seven: Little Piece of Heaven?

It is amazing the spectrum of emotion that a 10 year old can show in the space of 5 hours. The students start off the day one way, and five minutes later they are something totally different. It is amazing.

My teacher runs a very tight schedule. At the end of the day the students have 4 minutes to clean up their desks, do a job, get their backpacks ready and then be ready on the carpet for a read aloud. So far today was the first day they made it, but I can see the improvement.

There is also a nearly no-talking policy. During most of the day they are not allowed to speak at all. I am not sure how I feel about it, but it does make the transitions easier. And faster. I wonder how I will do the transitions in my classroom. But I guess if I have as much to do in a day as she does... I would probably do the same thing.

At the end of the day there was a boy who had been having trouble getting things done all day and he didn't want to wait to see what he was missing at the end of the day. He was starting to have a tantrum and it was looking to be a big one. But my teacher didn't drop her smile, she told him to take a deep breath. He wouldn't do it, and was doing this crazy angry thing. "You keep breathing and I'll help these two then we can talk" she told him. She helped the last two students, and while she did that he started taking deep breaths. When she came back to him he was able to have a pretty decent conversation. They resolved the problem, made a plan for tomorrow, and he was on his way with a high five. It was impressive.

Day 6: Just Another Manic Monday

Wow. Mondays are tough! I am going to be observing her classroom this week so that I can know how all of the procedures and such go before I start doing some lessons next week (on heredity.) Observing today was not that hard, but I can tell my teacher has been teaching for a while. Even while she was saying she was so scatterbrained, her classroom ran smoothly. The children knew where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there. They always knew what they should be working on, and they knew what they should have turned in already. I was so impressed by everyone! When you give the students those high expectations, they will exceed them!

There are two students who have had some trouble staying focused in the past. Their additional teacher came in at the end of the day. "Wow! You are such a good teacher! Those two were both doing their work!" And I think part of it is because she expects them to do their work. I will need to remember this for when I am teaching, have high expectations (that are also realistic) and the students will reach them.

There is so much paper work to do! Whether that be grading papers, cutting papers out, gluing papers, laminating papers, or just filing papers. There is always paper! Which is a great thing for a classroom. Thankfully all of the students in my classroom have their own computer so we are able to do quite a bit of learning with those. But there is a healthy balance between paper and computer work.

At the end of the day, I could tell those kids were ready to go home. An hour before school got out, at least 5 reminders were needed to tell them to stay on task. These kids work so well in the morning, but I think they should have some unstructured breaks in addition to their afternoon recess.

Speaking of recess. I have been thinking about Finland. For every hour of instruction time they have 15 minutes of unstructured recess for their students. (Or something similar to that, so I have heard) Yet their children are doing so well in school and their test scores (Which cannot show everything a child knows) are very high. They also don't start formally teaching their students to read until they reach the age of 7. How can those students keep up with our guys? Or rather how can our guys keep up with them? We are struggling to fit so much into a set amount of time, and each year we just have to put more into it. Our students need to learn one more thing, when we didn't have time to teaching the original 27 things.I read this article about the education system in Finland compared to Canada, and found it very interesting. It doesn't talk about recess but about how students and teachers are valued. My favorite quote from it was "I always say you can't take one element out and transfer it to your own country. Education is the result of culture, history, and the society of a nation." What does that say about our nation?

Day 5: First Friday of the School Year

Even though yesterday was the first day of school, you could tell today was Friday. Everyone, including myself and Mrs. Burton, were ready for the week to be done. However we did still do some amazing things, and I learned a ton!
First: ALWAYS put a section for Name ___________ on EVERYTHING. And always have a place for Student Name_______ on anything I want parents to bring back to me! Other wise I will have no idea which name goes with which child.
I learned that tests take FOREVER. Almost literally. Wow, I do not remember tests taking that long!

I was very impressed with how much forethought my teacher has put into everything. She keeps her plan books from previous years, and has been using them to plan for this year. She told me that she ALWAYS keeps them, especially when she did something really good that year.

The students all took a Personality quiz, but they didn't know what it was. Anyway later we grouped them according to their personalities and told them to make a skit of the Three Little Pigs and they had five minutes. Wow! You could tell they were all the same personality. The whites were whispering quietly, not making any decisions. The yellows immediately went into trying to build a house and were walking around on all fours. The reds were shouting out orders and the blues were all bunched together making sure everyone got a part. At the end of the 5 minutes we brought them back together and told them they would not be performing their skits, but this was an exercise. So we told them what personality color they got based on their test they had taken that morning. My teacher had the pros and cons of each personality listed and gave it to them. It was so cool to watch them recognize their strengths and weaknesses.

I need to figure out how I am going to keep track of the scores of students, assignments, missing work, and who needs to make stuff up. Do I want to use a computer program, paper and pencil, or some other way?

Day 4: The First day of School

Yesterday my teacher asked me if I had read The First Days of School by Harry Wong. I know that I have heard that is is an excellent book, especially for first year teachers, but I haven't read it yet. But after seeing my teacher's classroom today... wow! I am going to read that book! She told me she got most of the stuff she did on the first day of school from that book.

She explicitly went through every procedure she wants her class to do, talked them through it before she let them even try. She did a lot of rewarding when people did what she wanted and a lot of warnings for when they didn't do what she wanted. The kids responded so well to the structure of her classroom. She also had the expectation that they knew what to do. And so they tried to live up to that expectation. It was beautifully done.

Also, I wanted to show you the bulletin boards we put up. This year her classroom theme is Jungle Safari. She rotates through a few different themes. Anyway, here are our boards.

I had to take a panoramic for this one so it is a little strange. And there is a monkey and a giraffe in the jeep.

These are the classroom rules. Self Starter. On Task. Active Listener. React. When ever we catch one of them doing one of these we give them a star and they put it on the letter of the one he did.