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Week Thirteen

While the rest of my classmates were sad because this was their last week of field observations, I still have one more week to go so I was not quite as emotional. On Tuesday we helped out in the Kindergarten class. It’s funny, our mentor teacher for that class waited till the very end of our tutoring to start giving us lessons she wanted us to teach our groups. I taught my group about how adding a silent e at the end of a CVC words makes the first vowel a long one, which changes the word completely. For example, by ending an “e” to the end of “sit” it changes the word to “site”. It was nice to actually feel helpful in that class.

In CSS, we had our last lesson on Tuesday that Dr. Hoppey observed. He gave helpful feedback and answered the questions that we had. On Thursday, we administered our post assessment-the Core Phonics survey. Unfortunately, the student I am focusing my project on was not there so I will be getting it done on Tuesday if he shows up. 

This being almost everybody’s last week has made me think about how much I enjoyed the field experience and how helpful I think it will be in the future in Internship, and then as a real teacher! 

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Week Twelve

This week was very productive! On Tuesday and Thursday, we were finally given direct instructions from our Kindergarten mentor teacher on what she wanted us to work with the students with. Usually, we just help out around the class or work with a group on basic writing skills but this week we each took a small group and worked on reading long-vowel words with silent e’s at the end. It was nice to have a purpose and actually teach something to the class!

In our CSS class, we continued on to work with long and short vowels. We’ve gotten into a bit of a groove over the past few weeks, working our way through the vowels, and I think the boys are really catching on. They grasp the letter sounds much faster now. On Thursday we got observed by Dr. Hoppey while we worked on the short “I” letter sound. J and G got it pretty fast- they were able to move ahead without much help from me but E struggled a bit more. Kelly and I had to help him a lot more than the others, but this is most likely because he misses school so often. Mrs. A says that he is behind in everything because of his absences, which is really sad to hear. He is supposed to go on to middle school next year- I hope he doesn’t fall too far behind once he does get there. Dr. Hoppey gave us some good feedback and we are looking forward to trying to incorporate us in our observed lesson on Tuesday, which will be us going over long “i” words!

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Week Eleven

This week was testing week! The older grades had to take the FSA writing test this week. Kelly and I got the opportunity to help proctor, which I think was a good experience. We stayed in the library with a few of the students that were taking the FSA with accommodations. Mrs. A also pulled a few students during the time we were in there to come to the library to take the FSAA, which is the Florida Standards Alternative Assessment. 

As proctors, we were allowed to read the instructions and prompts to the students but we were not allowed to read the reading passages to them. We can prompt them to keep working but we can't give them any help whatsoever. Honestly, it was a little hard to walk around and just watch them work without being able to say the things we would normally say. For example, one of the students I read the prompt to flipped right past all of the passages and went right to writing his essay, even though the prompt specifically said that the students need to support their writing with details from the passages. Even after we reminded him that the instructions said to read everything and THEN write, he brushed us off and kept writing. It was hard to watch him do so and finish within the first twenty minutes because we all knew that his class had been practicing for this test for months and that he would most likely not pass it because he refused to read the passages. Another student straight up refused to take the test and we had to send him back to class because he was disrupting the other students. 

Testing is one thing, but the amount of standardized testing that every student has to go through these days is ridiculous. I’ve always felt this way but proctoring really made me realize how annoying and frustrating testing is, especially because their main purpose is to generate money, not actually test the students. 

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Week 10

Only three weeks left! That makes me anxious because I feel like there's so much to get done still with field and also a bit sad because I’m really going to miss the students and the school! 

This week went well! Kindergarten was hectic as always. Every week our mentor teacher seems to get more and more overwhelmed and I really feel bad for her. She deserves better and so does all of her students. It's a tough situation all around. When we weren’t running around trying to get the class under control, Kelly and I worked with the students on their writing skills. I have noticed how much the students struggle with comprehension. I will have them read a few (very) simple questions and when I ask them to write anything about what they read they are stuck. I am not sure if this is something we should try to work on or if comprehension will come along as their reading skills improve. 

As for CSS, we are working with more long and short vowels. I believe our mentor teacher was right when she suggested we slow down our pace when it comes to compacting too much into each lesson. Since we’ve been focusing on one thing at a time, I have seen a lot more comprehension. When we worked on short E in class Tuesday my student was able to complete the work with less support than usual. In fact, I hardly had to help him at all! I’m very happy to see some improvement, even if it is a small amount at a time. 

I am excited to help out with FSA proctoring this week, it should be a good experience.

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Week eight

This week was pretty good! Our Kindergarten class was as wild as always. I’m worried about our mentor teacher for that class. She has way too many students and is clearly overwhelmed (she’s the one who walked out a couple weeks ago and didn’t come back to school for a week). She expressed to me about how helpless she feels and how she is counting down the days until she has her leave that she requested. She even told me this might be the “worst” class she’s ever had. I really sympathize with her because she really is a good teacher she just has way too much on our plate. When Kelly and I are there we just try to make her life easier and help out whatever kids she needs us to help with. 

In CSS our mentor teacher said that the pace we were originally going was just too much for our students to handle. She said we needed to slow down and take their education one step at a time because they would not be able to handle anything else. I am not sure if I agree with her about their abilities 100% but we followed her wishes. We have started focusing on only one skill at a time for their lessons now. For example, instead of teaching long and short vowels fast (going over all short vowels in one day and then all long vowels another day) we have slowed down the process. Now we teach each vowel separately. On Thursday we worked on A and next week we will work on E. I am really excited to see the progress that they make because they are really smart, good kids. 

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Week Seven

This week was pretty tough, personally. On Thursday I wasn’t able to make it to Field because of a family emergency but I was able to be there on Tuesday and had a great time then.

On Tuesday I continued working with the Kindergarteners, even though we are no longer using them for our projects. I had each student pick out a book they were interested in reading and read it to themselves (which, to kindergarteners, means out loud, all at once). Once they finished I asked them to tell me what happened in the book and write it down. While we are really focusing on improving their writing skills I think their comprehension can use just as much work so I like to try to work on both at once. Most of the kids wanted to just copy down sentences from the book because that was easiest but I encouraged them to close their books and use their own words. This was very hard for them but I can see some of them getting better at understanding what it means to write creatively and not just take phrases straight from what they read. 

In our CSS class, we worked on short vowel sounds. One of my students was missing so I got to focus on just J, who really thrives on one-on-one instruction. I was able to keep him focused and he really had a fun time naming the pictures on the sheet, deciding if they contained the short vowel we were looking for, and coloring in the picture if it did. I think if it had been in a less engaging format he would have lost focus and interest right away. Now that he knows at least a little about short and long vowel sounds, I am excited to start working on having him be able to differentiate between the two. I’m excited for this week ahead of us!

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Week Six

This week was great! Our mentor teacher that was MIA last week finally came back and the classroom was back to normal. No trips to the ER or kids breaking laptops and running around the classroom refusing to do work. On Tuesday we did not get to work with our students because of the Black History Month recital practice. On Thursday, however, we got a bit of time. We had the kids pick a book they were interested in. Then, they read it to themselves and we had them write about what they remembered and liked about the book. This helped us gauge their handwriting and comprehension simultaneously. 

For our CSS class, we have finally figured out where we want to go with our projects. We know that the students in our group all have phonemic awareness down. They can name almost all of their letter and vowel sounds. What they really struggle with is distinguishing between long and short vowels and blending. They’ve been learning sight words all five/six years they've been in school so they really have no knowledge on how to blend and decode whatsoever. On Tuesday we tried out using the 100 Easy Lessons from Prof Nunes’ class. We found that the lack of pictures and engaging visuals didn't keep the student's attention at all. Our mentor teacher suggested we use something with lots of pictures because she had found that really helped them learn. Kelly was at Target and found these awesome first and second-grade workbooks that we tried out on Thursday. It had the kids identify cute drawings of animals and then figure out the first sound/letter of the word. For example, there was a drawing of a deer and then a line with “_eer”. We did about twenty of them, Kelly worked with B and I worked with G, E, and J. They boys really enjoyed it and were much more willing to work than they were with 100 lessons. We really saw them grasp the idea of sounding out words which we hadn’t seen much of before this activity, which was great. We will definitely be using this workbook sometime in the future again since they liked it so much.

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Week 5

This week was pretty wild. In our Gen Ed Kindergarten class something happened on Monday (we weren’t given all of the details) with one of the students, K. Apparently, she had a meltdown, drew all over the floors and acted out in other ways. After this happened, our mentor teacher walked out of her class and she has not been back since. K came back on Thursday and everyone was acting like nothing happened. On Tuesday and Thursday the class had subs and Kelly and I had to spend the whole time helping the subs get all of the students under control- we didn’t even get to really work with our assigned group of students because the class was acting so badly. When talking to our other mentor teacher she said Mrs. R really just needed a break and that she had the most difficult classroom because all of the “trouble” students that keep getting added to her class, which is almost at capacity. We also talked about how this was the first year they have not had three Kindergarten classes. Instead, they only have two teachers who are very overwhelmed with their large class sizes. A girl also got hurt on Thursday when her headband was shoved into her ear and cut the inside of her ear. Kelly had to take her to the office and wait with her as an ambulance was called. This just caused even more chaos in the classroom. 

In CSS, however, things are going great! We got our pre-assessments done with for our four students from the lowest reading group. We did the core phonics survey. We quickly realized that while two of our students could identify the letter and vowel sounds, they have no idea how to blend correctly since almost all of their prior instruction has been dealing with sight words and identifying phonics. I think this is what we will mostly focus on when it comes to teaching lessons because blending and decoding is such an integral part of becoming a good reader, which all of these kids have the potential of becoming. I’m excited to start teaching and working with them this week. 

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Week Four

This week Kelly and I finished up our pre-assessments for our kindergarten classroom. We had originally just given the students prompts and had them write what they want (picture 1) but Dr. Hoppey suggested we add comprehension into the pre-assessment. On Thursday Kelly read out of a book called “Pig the Pug” and then we asked the students questions and had them write down their answers (picture 2). This would allow us to assess their handwriting, spelling, and comprehension skills all in one quick activity. After that was done, since we still had some time left, I listed CVC words and they wrote them down as best they could.

We did not get to go to our CSS class because of our seminar on Tuesday. On Thursday, Kelly and I each taught a sight word lesson that the teacher provided. We talked to the teacher about a boy in her class, J, who is an ELL. She expressed how it can be hard to tell if he does not know an answer because of a language deficit or if he just needs extra support to learn the material.  

At the end of our field experience on Thursday (of course, after getting all of our pre-assessments done), Kelly and I talked and decided that we think we want to do our project with the CSS students instead of our Kindergarten classroom. There was a lot that went into this decision. In Kindergarten, we are working with the highest level students- ones that already know how to read and only need to really improve their writing, and we feel like we could make a bigger difference and have more to work with literacy-wise by working on reading and comprehension with the CSS students. Plus, the CSS teacher and para in the classroom we are in are so helpful and willing to try anything we want to that we think overall it will be a great experience. I am excited to get working on the pre-assessments Tuesday and hopefully start our lesson teaching on Thursday!

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Week Three

After being out all last week with pneumonia, I felt a little behind going into my field experience but with Kelly and our mentor teacher’s help I was quickly caught up. I am in a Kindergarten class and Tuesday we had no time to work with our students because they had to do their morning routine and then immediately go to an assembly that was happening. On Thursday, however, we got to get our pre-assessment done. Our teacher wants us to work with some of the higher-level students in her class on improving their writing. For our pre-assessment, we gave the four students we will be working with notebooks. We gave them prompts like “What is your favorite kind of food? Write some things about what you like about it” and then had them draw pictures to go along with their writing to make it more fun for them. We will do a post-assessment at the end of the semester to see how much their writing has improved. An instructional goal for this next week is to keep the students engaged the whole time. The rest of the classroom was doing activities as we were working and my students got distracted by their classmates occasionally. 

In our CSS class, we worked with a program called CT1 and CT2 to teach the students sight words. We get to see them do their morning routine every time and the students have fun introducing themselves and singing along to educational videos and marching around the classroom. All the students are so sweet in that classroom and I love working with them.