new room, new year, new students

I am happy to report that the first week of teaching has ended for this school year. This may not seem like a large feat to conquer, but since it is my first time in this position and with these students (grade ranging from K-8), believe me it is! The adjustment of routine again is good and yet hard on the body. I am appreciative to the new staff I am working with because they are very supportive. I have felt encouraged at every turn. The largest feat has been the scheduling of the students. I am fully responsible to plan the students minutes that they are required to receive in my resource room. It is quite tricky (as I have discovered and still am discovering) to make sure so many people are happy with the same plan at the same time. Once again, I can say that this staff is flexible and very helpful. Hurray for that!

I am looking forward to this year. I know much will happen and I will try to reflect on it all here. There was a lot of failure, on my part, last year on keeping this reflection of teaching/learning going, but I am more determined to make it happen this year!

Volunteering 101

Today in class, we read a sample persausive essay on why volunteering should be required of students. This brought about a conversation of whether or not we should be volunteering. The large majority of students agreed that they should be (especially for the reasons that were mentioned in the paper: giving back to the community, learning about self and earning more skills, and gaining good things for resumes). However, hardly any of the students had done service. This was a sad realization for me. I grew up doing service projects and volunteering with my peers and family. I don't want my students to miss out on that opportunity. So, if you are a parent, please be open and aware of ways that you can give this valuable experience to your child. Service learning is an important aspect of a well rounded education. (for more of a definition, visit this site or the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_learning ) I am resolving to incorporate a minimum of two service learning projects with every class that I teach.

The results of STAR testing

Today was the second day of two days of STAR testing. This standardized state test has many benefits to the school. The students, however, had a different view of the experience. The majority vote was that they wanted every day to start late and every class to be watching movies and playing games. Alas, despite their voiced opinions, we utilized all of the educational time with practicing skills and introducing our new section on writing persuasive essays. Persuasive essays are some of the most challenging, but I have high hopes for us to meet the standards and walk away with a solid understanding of the mechanics and purpose of writing.

Reflection on essay writing

The English Resource class has now entered a new section of our newest unit: essay writing. I am proud of what the students have completed so far. We have recently finished the section on how to write a response to literature. I used the novel, "Of Mice and Men", as our basis for prompts to write about. "Of Mice and Men" is the novel that we are reading in class. I am now conferencing with each student on their growth in writing skills over the past two weeks. I am excited to report that every student made great growth.
I have the same expectations for this section of the unit: "Persuasive essays". We will be focusing a lot of the effort on building the students' pre-writing skills. The pre-writing is essential to winning an argument within a persuasive essay. My hopes for this section is that the students will be able to form/list both for and against details/arguments for a variety of persuasive topics.

Frist Blog entry

I like having this blog to keep a more open communication with others. I only wish that I had my own classroom. I am student teaching at a great high school. I also student taught in a first grade classroom. This means that I am getting excellent teaching experience in a large range of grades. This is a blog that I hope to keep going, but ever changing as I grow in my teaching years.