Week 9: Inquiry

This week was an exciting week for my inquiry. As each day passes I have been observing a lot about what my inquiry student does and how she acts. But this week I began to actually try and talk to her about her actions and am excited to do even more.

            On Monday of this week, I was working with my students and tried to correct her on part of her work. I asked her to sit down and redo some of her work to make it neat and to try a little harder. She immediately shut down, would not make eye contact with me, and stuck her thumb in her mouth. As the day continued, my co-teaching partner and I were teaching a lesson and she was not on task. I asked her to put her book away and pay attention. She did this for a few seconds but as I walked away, she pulled it back out. I sat next to her and asked her to pay attention because we would have work to complete after this. She again, was defiant and did not even make eye contact. As the lesson went on, my co-teaching partner asked her to complete the worksheet we were doing with the class. When she did not do this, I sat down next to her and asked her to move her clip because she had been asked to do things by both of us and was not listening or following directions. She began to cry and make a scene. I took her into the hall and had a talk with her that we are trying to help her and need her help too. After discussing more, my mentor teacher helped me to get her to make eye contact and to respond to me talking to her. It was a hard process, but definitely a first step into figuring her out and how to help her.

            My mentor teacher has been great at helping with my inquiry process. She pulled my inquiry students aside this week and told her that it’s ok to be wrong and to realize that we are all there to help her. She reminded her that everyone makes mistakes and its ok to make some changes to help fix mistakes. I think this was very helpful in reinforcing the ideas I talked to her about.

            There was a big moment on Thursday when my inquiry student took my corrections and did what I asked. She completed a writing assignment and was eager to do her best work, even if that meant taking time to go through and change spelling mistakes or make it better. I moved her clip up to show her what a great job she did and how simple but beneficial taking time to accept corrections can be.

            My next step I want to try is to give her an individualized behavior chart on her desk. She is obviously very effected by the clip moving in class, but I want her to have her own that is there for her to see and realize what are good choices and what are bad choices.

Week 8: Field Trip and Inquiry

         My first field trip was quite an experience. I was ready for fun, and an easy day. But it was anything but easy. It was fun, but I was exhausted.

         On Thursday, we went to the University of Florida fishery and learned about many different types of fish. We got to see fish, feel fish, and at the end of the day even got to go fishing. I thought It was an overall great experience for the kids, but an exhausting one too.

            I also got to work a little more with my inquiry this week. It was a weird week since we just got back from spring break, but it was natural to just fall back into schedule with our class. My mentor teacher is being so helpful when it comes to my inquiry. She has helped me with building ideas and implementing these ideas in the classroom. She has helped me start to work with the behavior of my inquiry student, and to zero in on what she really need work and help on.

            As I learn more and more about my inquiry student, I know I will narrow down my field of study. I will focus on one subject to watch and work on with her and to hopefully improve her behavior during. I am excited to see how this will all work out and to see the changes I am hopeful to see in her.

Week 7: Social Studies Unit

This week we began teaching out social studies unit. It was a continued unit on black history month and was specifically about black history through the arts. I have never taught a unit, I have only taught single lessons on their own.

         We taught about three African American artists. On Monday we taught about Bill Robinson, Tuesday we taught about Langston Hughes, and we finished out unit with Duke Ellington. I enjoyed that we were able to connect all three of these people day-to-day and the kids could how us what they remembered from the previous lessons. I loved to watch the students listen to the artists’ songs or watch a video of them and be interested in what they produced.

One tricky thing to me was that we had to keep the lessons consistent to what our teacher did previously during her black history unit. For most of her lessons she taught about the person through a book and a video and then would create a chart encompassing the major ideas about the person. The students would then complete some kind of writing activity to show hat they learned. So we tried to keep this consistent, while still adding in the strategies we had.

Overall, I think the lessons went pretty well. I learned how important it was to find out students previous knowledge as well as be sure I know much about the person or topic we are teaching about. You do not want to teach the students things they already know, or they will be bored. So it is important to differentiate the instruction throughout. It was also important to know about the topic. The students were asking us a lot of specific details about the people. We were able to answer a lot of information but needed to look up some. After the first day, we were sure to bring in the information we found about each person so we could answer him or her to the best of out ability. Teaching a unit took a lot of perpetration but it was a great learning experience and know I can take all that I learned from it and create more units in the future.