First week back

I had a great time going back to my first grade classroom this week. When we first arrived on Wednesday we walked around the room helping the students with their math worksheets. Then our teacher asked us if we would be willing to jump right in and teach a lesson after they got back from recess! She had all of the materials and it was a pre-planned lesson that we just had to read over to know what to do. It took me by surprise, but I had a lot of fun! We read from a National Geographic magazine about humpback whales, created a K-W-L chart, and then the students worked with a partner to fill out a summarization sheet about the information in the magazine.

It was short and simple, but our teacher loved it! She thought we were great. That was really encouraging to hear. I love our classroom teacher. She is so sweet and easy-going, and really knows her students and how to manage them. One thing that was interesting about teaching a short lesson on our own, and even in observing the class the rest of the day, was noticing different personalities and tendencies of each of the students. It was really easy to tell right away which students crave attention and which students do not raise their hand very often.

Thursday we spent all afternoon interacting with and helping the students. We also did our first reading case study assessment, which was basically just getting to know the student a little better. When the students left at the end of the day we got a chance to talk to our classroom teacher and schedule when we will be teaching our lessons over the next few weeks. It was nice to get that figured out and to have a better idea of what the rest of the month is going to look like. I will be teaching my first lesson on Wednesday!