Week 16-December 6th-10th, 2010 and Inquiry

This was my last week at my PDS and I did not realize that I would feel so sad. It’s amazing to me how much I have learned this past semester and how much I have gotten to know my students. I am very interested in coming back to my classroom next semester and seeing how different the students have become and where they are with their Reading and Math skills. My mentor teacher says that I will definitely see a big difference. I am waiting on my feedback from my small group leader on my Inquiry. She will have this back on Friday and then I will have the weekend to work on it to submit the final copy on Tuesday. I am very pleased with the topic I chose for my Inquiry. It was truly a skill that needed worked on in the classroom and I believe that the majority of the students benefitted from my research and activities. I am looking forward to next semester and working on the contract hours that I have planned-I am very anxious to start the co-teaching and have different experiences. I am continuing my Inquiry project with all the Kindergarten classrooms at my PDS and I am anxious to see how this will go. All in all, I had a great semester and too many positive experiences to name here. I feel that I have grown as a teacher. I learned so much this semester about teaching strategies, classroom management techniques and differentiated instruction that I can continue to use in my teaching career.

Week 15- November 29th-Decemeber 3rd, 2010 and Inquiry

This week is my last full week at my PDS and my mentor teacher has taken over all responsibility of teaching. I am now observing in the classroom and I also got the opportunity to observe in the special education classroom, which was a different experience. Next week, my last day is Thursday because I started the semester on August 16^th. I am having mixed feelings about leaving my placement. I have learned so much this semester from my mentor teacher and from my experiences. I have really learned a great deal about the development of Kindergartners and I think it will be very interesting to visit this classroom in the Spring and see how these children have grown. My favorite thing to see is the invented spelling that the students use in their journal writing. It’s so interesting to me that even though the words most of the students write are not spelled correctly; I can still read and understand what the students are trying to say. The students in my PDS classroom really do a nice job of sounding out words and are constantly exposed to this in the classroom. My mentor teacher has been teaching Kindergarten for many years so she really provided me with a positive experience and showed me one of the best ways to teach Kindergarten students.

My Inquiry project is completed in the classroom. I have collected all the final data that I need for my write-up. Every student but one increased on the number of missing number sequences that they knew however, I came to the conclusion that I cannot say if this is the result of my study/activities in the classroom. I am going to continue my Inquiry project for my contract next semester. I am going to implement a “Math RTI” in Kindergarten and pull 2 students from each Kindergarten classroom. I am very excited to start this and see the effect that this has on the students learning the different classrooms. I have completed a draft of my Inquiry write-up to turn into my small group facilitator for feedback. After I get this back from her, I will be able to complete my final write-up and polish what I have.

Week 14- November 15th-19th, 2010 and Inquiry

This week at my PDS, I am just teaching Math. My mentor teacher has taken back over everything else. However, on Thursday and Friday my mentor teacher was at a conference and we had a substitute. I took over full-time teaching of everything again. It was interesting to get back into the swing of teaching and interacting again with the students on another level. Friday was the last day before Thanksgiving break and it was interesting to see how the students acted on this day before a break. I am anxious to finish my time in this classroom but I will be sad when I have to go. I have truly learned a lot of valuable information that I will always take with me and remember. I am working on completing my final missing number assessments in the classroom. I have started working on my write-up and am making charts and tables to display my results. I am struggling with figuring out which anecdotal notes to use in my write-up. I wrote down anecdotal notes on every child while they were working on missing number activities and I am currently trying to select two students’ notes who I think show a good progression of understanding with the activities. I understand that research does not have to show “perfect” outcomes but I truly had some students in the classroom who improved greatly with the understanding of this concept. I am going to work on my write-up over Thanksgiving Break and begin to compile the results of my study.

Week 13, November 8th-12th, 2010 and Inquiry

This week at my PDS, my mentor teacher took back some of the teaching. She stated that with Kindergartners, she likes to slowly take back certain aspects of the curriculum. I have been taking this time to observe the students and think about how much they have changed/grown since I started in this classroom. I also like to observe the way that the students respond to my mentor teacher since I have been teaching for a while in the classroom. Next, week my mentor teacher will take back Shared Reading and I will be responsible for Math instruction in the afternoons. I am sad to see the semester ending so quickly and I am curious to come back into my classroom next semester and see how different the students really are.


I have also decided to narrow my Inquiry results to the students who are in the red and yellow groups on mClass Math. I conducted my activities with the whole class but after thinking, many students were on level for the beginning of the year with missing number (green). So, my mentor teaching and I decided to assess how the students in the red and yellow groups have improved or not improved. We are also working on Progress Monitoring (re-assessing red and yellow students) for my Inquiry project this week and next week. After we get this done, I will then be able to compare these scores to the initial scores for the beginning of the implementation of my study. I am anxious to see how the students score on the “final” assessment. I want to see if my Missing Number activities have made any impact on the students. Although, I will never be sure that my activities were the only things impacting student performance on assessments.

Week 12- November 1st-5th, 2010

This week is my last week of teaching everything at my PDS . My mentor teacher and I decided to gradually ease me out of teaching. Beginning next week, my mentor teacher will take over the morning circle/calendar routine, shared writing and read-aloud. I will continue with Shared Reading and Math. The week of November 15^th, she will take back Shared Reading and the week after Thanksgiving Break, she will take over Math. During the time when I am not teaching, I may go to the special education room to observe, this is not an area that I am familiar with, but I would like to become familiar with this area. We had our contract meeting this week also. A lot of good ideas were mentioned during the meeting and I think that the theme of my contract is going to be co-teaching. I am interested in working in other grade levels at my PDS and co-teaching subjects that I have never experienced. I am also interested in co-teaching using SMART Board interactive lessons. This is something that I may do in the third grade at my PDS. They have many instructional units that they do and I would like to supplement the learning using SMART Board lessons.

I have not gotten to implement any of my games/activities for my Inquiry this week. We did not have Math at the begging of the week because we had to discuss Thanksgiving, we had no school and then we had to attend a play. I am hoping to do some more activities today with the students during Math Workshop. I am unsure of how my project will turn out and I am hoping to continue it into next semester with my contract hours. The main problem/issue has been finding the time to implement the activities with so much else going on in my PDS community and classroom.

Week 11-October 25-29, 2010

This week at my PDS, I have really been working on engaging the students in the morning routine which includes the calendar and shared reading. Everything has gone smoothly this week and I quickly move the students along in the lesson and make sure that they understand the concepts being presented. We have started doing Morning Message only one day a week and the rest of the days doing Shared Writing through grammar. This week we worked on adjectives. I would draw a picture of an animal and the students would have to describe the animal using an adjective such as shape or color. I modeled how to draw a picture and write sentences about the picture, which is what students do in Writing Workshop. I also modeled how a sentence starts with a capital letter and has a punctuation mark. The students seemed to really enjoy this kind of writing and the opportunity to come up to the pocket chart and circle adjectives, nouns, proper nouns, capitals and punctuation marks. The week after Thanksgiving break, my teacher will start taking back the morning activities with the students. I have about three more weeks to work with the students and truly engage them in the learning process.

I finished my third activity: Missing Number BINGO with the students this week during Math Workshop time and I started the fourth activity: Oh No, Missing Numbers! game. I can see a progression in SOME student understanding of the missing number concept. Students are beginning to interact more in the activities and state that the activities are “fun”. I am hoping that when I re-assess the students in November, they do not forget what they have learned. The assessment is timed, which is different from the activities I present the students-they are not timed. However, if a student struggles with a number sequence for more than 15 seconds, I usually say that we have to move on because on the assessment-you are not allowed to wait. After I complete the fourth missing number game, I will begin the fifth and final activity with the students and when that is finished, I will begin to re-assess them to collect my final data.

Week 10-October 18th-22nd, 2010 and Inquiry

This week at my PDS went very smooth. I am very excited to be teaching full-time in the classroom. I am working on engaging the students in the morning routine. This is a skill that my teacher and I had discussed last week. It is hard to keep Kindergarten students attention for a long period of time and I have been working on not asking too many questions (sticking to the basics) and moving through the lesson at an appropriate pace. My teacher stated that I am improving in this area. When I notice that I am “losing” students’ attention, I wrap up and move on to the next topic. This is a skill that my mentor teacher also talked to me about. She stated that this is the best way to try and keep students engaged in a lesson. I started using new Math lessons this week on the computer. I project them on a white screen in the front of the classroom for students to see. My mentor teacher and I have been working on tweaking this routine all week. The students are easily distracted by the projector and want to make shadow puppets. We have started having some student sit in chairs around the circle and some students sit on the floor. It has seemed to work so far. The topic of 1 more, 2 more is difficult for students to master so I had to teach it two days. It was a “teaching moment” for me when I realized that I needed to go back and re-teach. I approached the topic differently and used students as models. I could see that more students understood after the second day of instruction.

Inquiry: I starting implementing a new note card system this week to keep track of my anecdotal notes, which are my main source of data for my Inquiry project. I have a note card now for each student for each activity/game that I conduct in the classroom. This will hopefully allow me to write more notes on each student and keep the notes more organized. I am working on finishing up the third activity-Missing Number BINGO. Next week, I will begin the fourth activity- Missing Numbers, OH NO! (Board game for students to play.) I am working on observing how student’s understandings are progressing as the weeks go along. I can see an increase in understanding with each activity for some students, while other students stay the same or do not understand at all. I am anxious to go over my anecdotal notes/record at the end of my study and really analyze students’ thinking.