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.