I feel like I'm a real teacher here and it's so awesome. Ms. Raftery has had me do so much and I have learned a lot. She has had me take over Reading and she wanted me to do Non-Fiction, so I took home excerpts from this book about teaching Non-Fiction and have planned my Reading lessons for everyday. My observed lesson that Kyle watched me do was teaching the kids how to summarize main ideas when reading Non-Fiction and it went so well. I didn't think teaching Non-Fiction would be that exciting and I didn't think the kids would be that engaged, but I was wrong. There was a bin of Non-Fiction books in the classroom that I used and there were lots of books about animals, and weather, and volcanoes and Mt. Everest, etc. The first day I introduced Non-Fiction and we compared and contrasted Non-Fiction and Fiction and the kids came up with examples of Non-Fiction. Then I taught them the different strategies while reading, like summarizing main ideas, etc. I had them look through the books and practice the skills they learned and I was thrilled when I realized how excited they were. They would be like, "Ms. Jones, did you know...!?" and they were so excited about the different things they were learning from reading these books. They would look at the books together and talk about them. Eleonora was really engaged in a book about endangered animals and when Reading class was over she was upset she didn't get to finish it so I told her she could take it home and finish reading it. The next day she brought it back and showed me a part that talked about endangered animals in China and we're learning about Ancient China in Social Studies so she was making that connection, and it made me so happy. Things like that are so rewarding for a teacher and it made me feel so good. The last day we had Reading, I had the kids read a book and "teach" it to the class. Alessandro read a book about snakes and he talked for about 20 minutes about all this interesting stuff he learned about snakes and all the kids were so engaged and asking questions and talking about it. It brought a huge smile to my face. It was so cool to have taught them their Non-Fiction unit and to have them be so excited and engaged.
The third week of practicum, Ms. Raftery had to get DRAs done (reading assessments to determine their reading level) so she had me take over pretty much all the lessons. I did Social Studies one day and I taught them about the Silk Road. We made a web diagram about trade and the importance of it and then we read about the Silk Road and talked about it and I also briefly introduced Marco Polo. I did Math one day and I taught them 3D shapes. First we went over homework and I would call on someone to give the answer and then the kids would give a thumbs up or down. Then I introduced the 3D shapes and we had the actual shapes to use so they could see them. I taught them edges, faces, and vertexes and then passed the shapes around and partners would study the shapes and count the faces, edges, and vertexes. And then they filled out a table with a picture of the shape and they would identify the shape and say how many edges, faces and vertexes it had. I also showed them nets and I drew a net for a cube and folded it up into a cube and passed it around for them to see. At the end, Claudio, Cosimo and Alice came up to me and told me that I did a really good job teaching them and that it was really interesting. It melted my heart :). And then we had snack and Riccardo used his snack time to make his own net and showed it to me--so cool. I also did Language Arts and Spelling. In Language Arts we corrected sentences with commas and colons and they also wrote a news paper article about the music recital.
We had the music recital on May 30. Louisa sang and she has the most beautiful singing voice-it truly gave me goosebumps. Andy and Cosimo played the violin. Riccardo played the electric keyboard and Alessandro played the trumpet, which is the first brass instrument in Marymount. The Arts is a really big deal at Marymount. There are lots of plays and concerts and such. Mr. Williams is the music teacher and he is British and a huge drama queen. The big 4th grade production was on June 7 which was Thursday and we basically didn't have any classes that whole week-it was all play practice. Mr. Williams just expected to have the kids all day without it messing anything up and he was so annoying. And he wanted us to be there the whole time at the practices too to help keep the kids under control, because he refers to students as "animals" (why are you a teacher??). But it was worth it because the show was adorable.
Ms. Raftery's class is paired up with a kindergarten class to take care of the garden. On Wednesdays they go out to the garden where they are growing veggie plants and water the plants together.
May 23 was May Crowning which is Mass. Catholics worship Mary a lot and all the kids brought in a flower and we made them into bouquets and the kids "crowned" the statue of Mary with all the flowers. All the kids either wore their first communion outfits or their very best school uniforms and we had Mass and Communion in the auditorium and sang hymns and scripture and prayers were read. It was really nice.
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| Our class's bouquet for Mary |
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