Goodness it has been a LONG time since I've posted on here. I don't even know where to start. It has been such an incredible experience in my first year teaching. I absolutely love my job. Of course, I am writing this over Thanksgiving break, where I have the whole week off, but still, I do mean it.
I looked over my last post and literally laughed at how much has changed and how much I have grown and learned as an educator. I barely feel like the same teacher! I have finally gotten into a groove of things and figured this whole teaching on my own thing out! Let's go back to September…
September- To sum up the month of September, I would start with Soccer! I teach at a K-8 school and they needed a middle school soccer coach. Well, I did play soccer for 10 years of my life. And I did play soccer in college intramurals. And I do love soccer. And I already have no time for anything, so why not add something else to my list of accomplishments, right? I may be crazy, but I LOVED coaching soccer. I was the head soccer coach for my 5th-7th graders, (remember we don't have 8th graders yet so we include 5th graders in sports this year). I had 15 players who I think I learned so much from. I started with an assistant coach, but lots of changes happened at school and well, let's just say she was one of those changes. In plain words, she was fired. Not from coaching, but from teaching, which by default means fired from coaching too. So there I was, new teacher, coaching a group of middle school students, on my OWN. It was a challenge but a blessing. I met great students and amazing parents. I felt more connected to the school than ever and absolutely loved it. I taught them everything I know about soccer and we had a fabulous season. We only won 3 games, and went 3-9 for the season, but we still did good. We actually made it to the playoffs! We lost our first game, and ended our season, but we still did surpringly well despite all odds. We had 15 players, most who were 5th graders, most who have only played soccer for a short time or never before. And the other teams had been playing together for years, and were mostly 8th graders. 13 and 14 year olds versus 10 and 11 year olds is just not fair. But hey, we survived and even won a few games. It was a blast and I enjoyed it.
September outside of soccer-
I don't remember too much details, other than this is when I started to get to know my students more. I started to learn more about the school, teaching, and honestly myself. I learned how much better of a teacher I became when I stopped pretending to be someone I'm not, and just had FUN teaching. That's exactly what I did, and I have not turned back. Not one day goes by where my students and I are not laughing at something. Not one day goes by where I don't get my students up and moving around. not one day goes by that I feel that I have enough time to do things! Lol! But I have made teaching and learning fun and enjoyable for all students. That is my ultimate goal, and so far I have accomplished it.
I actually use the things I learned in school, unlike what EVERYONE told me. Everyone kept saying what you learn in school you will not have time to use. They are CRAZY! And probably not good teachers. Oops, did I say that? Ha. But seriously. I use Kagan strategies for grouping, for activities. My kids LOVE Quiz, Quiz, Trade. They ask me to play it every day. They know how to do think, pair, share and stand up, hand up, pair up. The are competitors when it comes to I have, Who has, and they love playing Jeopardy versions of games for learning. I use the data from assessments to teach. I use exit slips. I enjoy teaching and my students enjoy learning.
More into October now-
We FINALLY finished changing students around and my class roster is SET and not changing, unless we get new students, but it's set for now. I have 20 students in my homeroom and 18 in the other class I teach for a total of 38 students! Of my 20, I have one ELL, one student on the ASD with Aspergers, one student being tested for memory issues and dyslexia, one student with extreme ADHD (I say extreme because it's more than just a diagnosis, its a lifestyle and not something this child can change himself), and a couple others who have interesting issues. I have 3 students with peanut allergies, which is CRAZY to me. I didn't know it was so common, but I have 3 in one class. I also have a few serious medical conditions that I have to be careful with. I absolutely love my students, even though they are a LOT of work to deal with!
The other class has 18 students, whom 11 are labeled gifted and the other 7 are currently being tested for gifted, or just have highest scores and were put in that class. That class is a handful, but I love them too. They are so much fun, because they keep me on my toes. I have to be careful of EVERYthing I say because they take things so literally and are so smart. Some of them could probably skip 3rd grade, but it's too late now, so they are with me. Now it's my problem to deal with their genius like behavior. To explain, I have THREE students who although we just learned multiplication and division, already know square roots and how to compute with them. For example, they told me that know what square roots are. I pulled them to a small group to find out if they were serious or not, and couldn't believe what I found out. I would ask a problem like, "what is the product of the square root of 64 and 81?" Immediately, like within 15 seconds, they could tell me 72, because 8x9=72. WHAT!?!?! Square roots are in the 8th grade standards. Yep, I checked. Anyway, these kids keep me working and finding fun ways to learn because they are very bright and intelligent and a basic 3rd grade curriculum out of a textbook surely won't work for these kids. Luckily, they have me as a teacher. And anyone that knows me as a teacher knows I would NEVER just use the textbook to teach. That would be a waste of time for ALL of us. Oh, and my gifted students point out textbook errors, test from the textbook errors, etc. They notice everything!
In math, so far we have covered:
-place value and rounding (taught them the awesome song- 5 and above give it a shove and 4 and below, let it go.. with hand motions of course!)
-graphing including line plots (we made a human line plot that was wicked awesome), bar graphs, and pictographs
-multiplication
-division
We use math manipulatives for as much as possible. I love it, the kids love it, it's great!
In science, we have worked on:
-energy such as potential and kinetic, light and heat energy, etc.
-investigating questions and basic scientific words and scientific method
-basic astronomy like what the earth and stars are, what is the sun, etc. 3rd grade doesn't cover the fun stuff like planets or earth and moon rotation and revolutions.. :(
NOW we are working on STEM Fair. Let me tell you STEM Fair, which stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math, is the EXACT same thing as science fair that we did as kids, except know we use the term STEM to allow for outside of the box experiments and projects. I think it's a little silly, but hey I love STEM teaching and learning, so in turn, I love STEM Fair. It was a HUGE challenge because in 3rd grade, the students do small group projects for STEM Fair. Which means, it must all be done in class. I wanted nice even groups, so for my homeroom of 20 students, I made 5 groups of 4. For the other class, I did 6 groups of 3. I thought it would be better for the gifted kids to be in groups of 3 anyway, more of a challenge. Now think about, the students had to come up with a topic, write the purpose of their project, hypothesis, materials list, variables, step by step procedures, data charts, and conduct the experiment and write conclusions in groups. All at the same time. With just ME in the room. I said, YEAH RIGHT! I knew that would be a disaster. I had just me for the first week of planning. Then by the 7th day when it was time to actually conduct the experiments, I invited parents to come help me. I created a Doodle online to have parents sign up on. A doodle is a website that is made for scheduling with a large group of people. I used it as a sign up sheet, so I could limit how many could come at a time, and so everyone can see when everyone else is coming. I ended up with between 2 and 5 parents in my room at a time. They were SO helpful. I could not have done it on my own.
Now for Social Studies, let me remind you our fun situation. Our school scheduled 60 minutes of Social Studies a day, and did not provide a curriculum for us. Meaning no textbooks, no pacing guide, no way to know what to teach, etc. We went to the county's pacing guide and used that for guidance. We have covered directions, map skills, government including 3 branches and different levels of government, and recently started the 5 Regions of the US Unit. This is fun because it is a LONG project. We started with the West and will move into all the regions. Eventually, once we finish all 5 Regions, the students will do projects on a region of their choice. We are hoping to do Powerpoint or Prezi projects with them. Our students are 8 and 9 years old, so this may be a challenge, but they can definitely do it. I'm excited for this part to come, even though it probably won't be until February or March.
Overall, I still LOVE teaching. Next month we only have 3 weeks of school before Holiday break. I am looking forward to all the fun festivities before the holidays, but we still have a lot of content to cover. In math we are going to my favorite math concept, but probably the hardest to teach: FRACTIONS. In science we are finishing up STEM Fair and then starting properties of matter.
Hopefully it will still be 2013 the next time I post… :)
-Michelle
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