Week 5

It felt weird starting the week on a Tuesday but even more so as it’s our last week of field experience. I know I’ll have many options to learn more this week with everything our CT has informed us we’ll be doing. I had to help three of the boys finish writing journal entries to start the day. All three could keep writing sentence after sentence filling their journals if they simply focused on completing their work but with each one, either working in small groups or individually, needed to be reminded to “keep rolling” at least once every couple of minutes. When one would look up frustrated and say they don’t want to write anymore I just want to say, “if you would have been working this whole time you would have rejoined the class ten minutes ago.” It’s especially maddening when the student only needs to copy their “sloppy copy” to their writing journal. How hard is it to copy your own words? At Target, I found a couple books that I had to buy to use as my final read aloud books. One was a third in the series started with Iggy Peck, Architect which I had never known was printed, Ada Twist, Scientist. The second book was called The Book with No Pictures and it is unbelievably funny. I also think it will help the students in the future with writing stories because it breaks some of the boundaries of children books. Abbie and I played rock paper scissors to find out who helps with a spring art project and who needs to help with writing journals. After misfiring twice, we finally got the one, two, three, shoot rhythm correct and I won. I spent most the day in the kids connection room helping the students glue paper squares onto what should become plant stems. Most of the students seemed to care about the quality of their work while a few just seemed to want to race to the finish. I was surprised as some of these students were the ones that could care less about some of their other work. Why don’t you want to spend as much time on this fun work? I’m glad that the CT was impressed with the speed at which I helped the students finish the first step of the project. The students left to gym at their usual 10:45 and our CT had plenty of work for us to grade, again reminding us she’s going to squeeze all the help out of us as possible. Some of the grading is really fun actually, especially math and spelling quizzes. We are planning on doing the spelling quiz review activity again tomorrow, our last day. It should be an exciting way to leave the kids. On our final day we find out that the students have this reader’s theater in the library which will not allow us to do our activity, which I’m pretty bummed about. I raced through cutting out their paper stems while the rest of the class, Abbie, and our CT were at reader’s theater. After the students got back to the class we found out they had a special sending off for us which included a cute signed card. In groups of two the students approached us and either could shake hands, give fist bumps, salute or give us a goodbye hug. It was adorable that most chose the final option. I’m planning on stopping in a couple times before the school year is done and hopefully will have time to try out a new activity or two. Of course we squeezed in about forty-five minutes of grading and sorting assignments before our final clock out. I feel like I had twice the take away from this semester’s field experience but it solely felt like classroom or work time. I know I always hope to have close connections but maybe I need to flip that switch to just think of the educational benefit.