Katie's final post

This week was a short 4-day week.  The students had MCA testing on Wednesday and Thursday, which shortened our time with the students even more.  During their testing time, we were left with a lot of grading, housekeeping in the classroom, and example making:

Above, I created an Ozo Bot path as an example to retell If You Give a Moose a Muffin, to show them what they are going to do on Monday while the Minnesota Department of Education visitor is in the classroom.  My cooperating teacher has shared this story to the students, but they are going to create a path to create a finished circle story for If You Give a Mouse an iPhone.  That story doesn’t end where it started, so she asked the students to complete the circle and use their imaginations and come up with a great way for the child and mouse to come home.

I got to teach and reteach temperature again.  Negative temperature and scale (how some thermometers count by 2’s on the hashes, and some count by 1’s) can be a tricky concept.  I saw a lot of light bulb moments, which was rewarding.  We also got to witness additional frustration in having to deal with difficult parents.  Talking through her thinking and ideas was insightful and helpful for preparing me for the future—I really appreciated being allowed to see the inner workings of her thinking on the matter.

Thursday had a really weird vibe in the building.  My cooperating school is undergoing a transformation next year.  The whole school will be Spanish-Immersion.  The English-Speaking classrooms will have to have Spanish instruction everyday (a hybrid classroom of mostly English, part Spanish).  Our cooperating teacher took part of her planning period to go find out if she was going to have a job at this building again next year or not.  When she came back, she seemed shocked, with a mixture of confusion and excitement.  She is being relocated to a new building and will be teaching 4^th grade.  She seemed happy about the change and excited to make the move, but with all change, there were stages of grief and shock.  The staff lounge was buzzing with talk of who was staying, moving, and just gone.  My cooperating teacher had multiple people stop through, very upset that my teacher was being moved.  It was an aspect of teaching I hadn’t given much thought about.

On our last day, my partner and I decided we’d share a treat and an Earth Day activity.  The teacher chose two books for us to read aloud, we did Earth Day Bingo, and we had a gluten-free, dairy-free, fruit-free, and everything-I’m-allergic-to-free snack. I feel like I made great connections so it was sad to say goodbye.