The End of B4

Sorry to have left you all with few posts in the last two months. Here is the massive much needed update. To begin with the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas break was the most intense few weeks of my student teaching. The reason for this is that we were attempting to get in as many standards as we could before our benchmark tests. We were also doing report cards, and trying to tie in as many multicultural holiday themed lessons as possible. Not only was the intensity in my classroom, but also outside of the classroom for Long Beach State we had everything due for all of our classes, so I found myself teaching all day and working on school to do lists every other minute.

Even though it was a very stressful time, I found that some of the lessons that i taught during this time were the best. We were able to really focus in on our small groups and target certain ability levels. I was able to excel in working with the new Daily 5 program that we had been trying to instill in our classroom, and I co-taught an amazing literature compare/contrast lesson with my partner Shannon, on Cinderella. This was an amazing experience because we have come full circle this semester and this was concluded and seen in this lesson.

To give you just a bit of information on how this lesson went: we both had a version of Cinderella, my partner had the traditional fairy tale and I had a Mediterranean version called Cendrillion. While the reading for this story was a bit difficult as it had some words in a different language, the students were enthralled in a new version of a story they already knew. We had also created visual input maps for us to do a storyboard on which really brought the visual component for our students. We each got the opportunity to do our own storyboard input and had the opportunity of teaching our part in on our own. This experience was amazing because in the beginning of our semester, we worked together to teach lessons often, however, we found that it was much more difficult to plan, build, and execute every lesson together, so we decided that we might gain more insight into teaching by producing and performing the lessons independently.

By coming together at the end of the semester to teach together and with how successful it was- I feel we truly demonstrated how far we have come this semester. This lesson demonstrated how much we had learned, how strong our collaboration and teamwork skills had gotten, and finally, how much we had learned as teachers. As for the end of the semester, it is actually the end of second grade and the end of the school for Christmas break. I am sad to be leaving the school and my partner- I am going to miss the kids a lot, and I know this is good training because each year you lose the kids you had and it is hard, especially if they leave the school all together. I am sad to be leaving this assignment behind, but I am looking forward to the new experience ahead of me.