Catching up

My computer has not been working for a while, so I apologize for my lack of blog updates. I've actually been slowly writing this for a week and just haven't published it yet, but I'm going to publish it this time whether it's completely up to date or not

MONDAY OCT 26th

Well, Monday went smooth. I taught math and it went really well. Katrina tried to stall the whole time. She would ask me random questions, like "how old are you?" and "how long have you been teaching?" and she would tell me I'm such a good teacher. It would have meant a lot more to me if I hadn't known she was only trying to stall from the lesson.

If I had written this immediately after school I would have had a lot to say, but since it's almost a week later, I don't really remember what I was going to say. I did write down some of the things that happened though.

The students were reading something about treasure, so Beth asked where some good places to hide treasure would be and one of the boys yelled out, really excited, "In a book!" Beth was a little surprised by this answer, but then she thought of a dollar bill and asked him what kind of treasure would be small enough to fit in a book. He looked at her confused for a minute and then yelled "Oh, a marble!" I had to laugh.

Also, Beth has a really good idea that I noted that I want to remember. When she does little quizzes and reads them out loud, she gives each student a cookie sheet with the magnetic letters a, b, c, and d on them and the students hold their cookie sheets so no one else can see then put their answer on it and show it to her. Cute idea!

Beth asked Justina and Jase what their favorite games were. Jase answered Candy Land and Justin said he couldn't think of one. Jase then said that Justin's favorite was beating up his brother. Beth said that that wasn't a game and Justin told her "no, it's an activity!"

Also, I don't know if I already mentioned, but I made a big turkey out of construction paper for Beth's bulletin board, but none of the students ever know what it is. They always call it a chicken. This is not a reflection of my work, however, because it really does look like a turkey. Justin caleld it a chicken though and Beth looked at him funny, so he knew he called it the wrong thing, but then he called it a roster. Again, not a reflection on my craft abilities.

Paw Paw has this program called Bulldog Buddies and high school students come to the elem school to help students who need tutoring. One boy comes to out class because his brothers are in it. While he was there Monday, Justin hit his finger on the guy's elbow and said "I cracked my finger on his tricep." Then Jase, whose brother is a marine, asked the guy if he could move his "these" and put his hands on his pecs. Beth told him they're called pecs, because you could tell Justin and Jase only knew to call them boobs or something like that and didn't want to say it in front of us. But then when the guy said no, he couldn't move his pecs on their own, Jase said "My brother can! He's a marine, he's got skills!"

WEDNESDAY OCT 28th

On Wednesday, we were writing essays about what we were going to be for Halloween. Jacob is a fourth grader, who has been in Beth's class for four years. Apparently, e has been a ninja every year. He wanted to write his essay about Ninja's and at first Beth was saying no, but then he almost cried so she just went ahead and let him.



Jacob is pretty adorable. He says Hi to me everytime he sees me, like literally, we'll have been in the same room already for an hour but he'll turn and see me or walk past me and say "hi" again. He's too cute.



When they were writing about their halloween costumes, Beth was doing her example and hers was a bumblebee. She did this lesson in two different classes and everytime the boys would all say "from transformers?" when she said she was going to be a bumblebee. Oh, boys.... The way she was doing the writing lesson was by having the topic on the top, Bumblebee, then lines coming off of it for the 3 subtopics. Beth had decided to help Weston, the only 1st grader with four 4th graders, by writing his subtopics on the board as an example for him. Well, Weston was going to be a zombie, so Beth's example ended up looking like this :

Bumblebee- Scary, Bloody, Eat People



Also, during our talk about Weston being a zombie, one of the students, i can't remember which one said, "Weston eats people, he's a carnival." Hahaha



Justin was going to Optimus Prime and their 3 subtopics had to be reasons why they want to be that for halloween. One of Justin's reasons was because Optimus can fly. Then for each subtopic they had to have 3 sentence topics. Justin couldn't think of anything so we asked him where he would fly to. It took him a while, but then he decided on Michigan. Michigan? Of all the places...



I saw this good idea for skip counting. When I was doing the math lesson plan I realized that Izzie and Katrina can skip count from 0 to 20 by 2's but they can't go past 20 and they can't start at any random number and go from there. The idea I saw was a maze with numbers in it and if you skip count by 2's or whatever number you want to make the maze with, then you can get tot he end. so there's a fork in the maze and you're on 2 and you can choose 3 or 4, you would choose 4 then 6 then 8 and so on. I might make one for them and have it start at 20 and count by 2's.

Another idea that I saw, this one in Beth's class is she has this big box that she cut two sides out of and everytime they take a test a new student gets to take it witht he box around them. It prevents from cheating and the kids think it's really cool.

So, Katrina is the one I've been talking about that gets frustrated so easily and tries to stall from everything. Well, today I was working with Izzie and Beth was working with Katrina. Katrina was working with time. She had a big manipulative clock in front of her and Beth would put it on a time and ask her what time then would ask what time half an hour ago. Well Katrina was getting frustrated so she just started giving the wrong answers on purpose and would give Beth this little smirk. Beth got ffrustrated with her and asked me to switch. What Katrina was doing was saying it was 9:60 instead of 9 o'clock. The big clock she was looking at had 1-12 written big and then 5-60 counting by fives smaller above the 1-12. Well, Katrina knew to say 6 o'clock, but she was being a smart alick and just reading the numbers because the back a half hour part was frustrating her. After a while she started just not being cooperative at all. It was really frustrating, but it made me realize how much I am going to have to work on my patience. Really, I think all she needed was a break. She had been working on clocks for a long time and although she does need the practice because shes not getting the hang of it, she's not going to get it if she gets in a mood like that. I think a break would have been the best for everyone.

Also, I met the Speech Language Pathologist and she was really nice. Beth introduced me to her though as Shelley and Jase heard her and then he gave us this little smirk and calle dme Shelley. We laughed, but then Beth told him I'm still his teacher and he needs to call me Ms. Crane.