Happy Thanksgiving!

I taught more yesterday in my field placement then I have any day since I began my student teaching-and it was absolutely exhausting. To start the day off, I ran journal time with the kids. This consists of me writing a question on the board, asking them individual what the answer is, writing it down for them under the line, and then having them rewrite it about the line. The question for yesterday was, "What are you thankful for?" Let me tell you, in a SPED classroom, you get some interesting answers. One girl gave me the traditional, "I am thankful for my family-my mommy my sister and my puppy." However, other students gave me answers such as, "my crayons" or "my marbles" or "pants!" I guess as long as you are thankful for something.... Seriously, who isn't thankful for pants?!

Next, we did morning business, which is a lesson I do every day. Each student has a job (schedule, calendar, weather, lunch, and pattern). One at a time we go through and do the jobs, until morning business is done. It always takes for every, because no one pays attention to each other, then someone doesn't want to do their assigned job, etc. It never fails to be a difficult task.

Then, it was story time! I had a thanksgiving book to read to my students, and it was a sticker book! Yay for interactive reading! While I read the story, I had students place stickers that match the part of the story we were reading. They seemed to love it, and the stickers helped them pay better attention to my reading. Win win!

After we read the story, the students had to worksheet that they filled out based on the story so that they could earn their pennies. (They earn pennies through out the day for good behavior, and then get "store time" a few times where they can spend their pennies on whatever reward they want, ie. iPad, computer, marbles, etc.)

 (My favorite part of the story was all the different animals.)

(I am going to eat turkey.)

Next was snack time, which I normally just observe, but yesterday I was in charge. Snack time is designed to help my students learn social behavior with their peers, so we give every student the wrong snack. Then, when they want some of their own snack, they have to ask whoever has it. And we never give them their whole snack, that way they have to keep asking. It's building relationships and language skills. As the teacher, I had to ask them questions to lead a peer discussion, but everyone is always too focused on their snack to talk. But, I learned lots about what they are going to eat for Thanksgiving... my students sure do like to talk about food!

After snack, I took 2 students down to the lower playground for recess-by myself! Normally I just have one, but we were short an EA. Of course, these two didn't want to play anywhere near each other. Recess totally stresses me out, due to the fact that our students frequently try to run away. Luckily  I came back with the same two kids I went down with. Yay!

When we came back from recess, I got a tiny break. It was math time, and they do most of their math work independently. I worked one on one with a student during that period, then took that same student to lunch, and lunch recess.

Following lunch recess, one of the general education teachers in my classroom asked me if I could come help her with her class, because her students seem to really like me (they are the students that my students sit with at lunch). I helped her take pictures of her students for their class project for a little while. They are a second grade class, and someday I really want to teach 2nd grade, so I like getting to observe in that classroom too.

The rest of the day was quite relaxing-Independent computer work time. The kids wouldn't stop talking about having no school on Thursday. They will probably be extremely rowdy next Monday after such a long break..... oh joy!

The Curse of Monday....

Today was definitely a Monday for my kids. Everyone was a little bit off. I'm currently in a SPED classroom where all of the students have autism. It is a model site for the Hawaii Department of Education, and they are planning on opening up an entire for school kids with autism based on my classroom.

My student who is always on top of everything and known as the "easy" child to work with wouldn't pay attention or do any of her work. I spend most of my day working with her, so having her act out was very unusual. The other "well behaved" student in the class was absent today, so we were stuck with mostly the problem children. Our first grade student decided that his phrase for the day was "I'm going home." My mentor teacher would ignore him, hoping the behavior would stop, and at one point he took off running down the hallway to go home.

The youngest child in our SPED classroom is a kindergartener, and we discovered today how good he is at explaining autism. He will say things like, "Make my head stop," or "why is everything so loud," or "I can't stop moving!" Those are all symptoms of autism, and it absolutely breaks my heart when he asks a teacher to "make his head stop." We would if we could.

The student that I was working with today made a wreath in her general education class. It's a little early for christmas, but I thought it was adorable-and super easy for the 2nd graders to make.

In honor of Thanksgiving this Thursday, the students have been doing all sorts of adorable turkey-related assignments. I thought this one was particularly cute- they color the parts and mix all the pages up, and then have to match the words that go together! Other pages say things like pumpkin pie, roasted turkey, etc. 

I found these absolutely adorable worksheets for coloring on pinterest. My students like to work for color-by-number worksheets, and my mentor teacher was looking for something they could color to put on the bulletin boards. I thought this was perfect! Here is a close up example from the student I worked with:

And here is what the bulletin board ended up looking like:

It was a fun activity day, but it was rough day for behavior. But Monday's are always rough, so tomorrow should be better. :)

Welcome!

I am creating this blog so that I can keep track of all the lesson ideas that I see during my student teaching and tell stories about the wonderful students that I have the pleasure of working with. This will be a great resource for me to use in the future when I have my own classroom!