Creative arts and Language arts in one!!!

Creative arts!!!

Language Arts

Lesson about continuous cycles and informative writing...

Anticipatory Set:

We talked about cycles yesterday. Butterflies start as an egg. When they hatch they are a caterpillar. Then they make a cocoon until they come out as a butterfly.

We are also in a cycle. (Teacher acts out baby, child, adult, and elder.)

Objective/Rationale: Students will be able to tell what a cycle is and write about it. Students should notice cycle that keep going and be able to write using information.

ELA2W1 The student begins to demonstrate competency in the writing process. The student

b. Uses traditional organizational patterns for conveying information (e.g., chronological order, similarity and difference, answering questions).

c. Uses transition words and phrases.

Retention Aid: (motion in a circle) Cycles are special because they keep going and going and going.

Teacher Input: Think about other cycles that happen. Raise your hand if what I say is a cycle: water cycle, reading a book, watching TV, daily activities, a butterfly’s life, and processes like recycling, getting dressed. (Have a list naming steps or a set of visuals for some of the cycles, especially for teaching ESOL.) We are going to cut out pictures and glue them to make our own cycle. Then we are going to write a draft using our cycles.

This doesn’t have to be a real cycle. We are going to pick pictures and make up a cycle.

First, let’s review our supplies and process.

We are going to look through the magazines for pictures and decide on our cycle. Then we are going to cut out the pictures and glue them to our construction paper.

We are going to use our scissors and glue properly or we will be doing a pre-write without cutting and pasting.

Once our cycle is complete, the area will be tidied up and our notebooks taken out to draft our cycle. What is the name of the cycle? What happens first? What are the events or steps in order? Do you participate in and like this cycle? Remember to use the transition words.

Student Activity: Cut and Paste to create a cycle. (15-20 minutes)

Student Activity: Use the cycle as a pre-write and write a draft describing it. (10-15 minutes)

Closure/Ticket out the door: What is special about a cycle?

Teaching lab- November 30

          Today I taught the second graders. We have been over the writing process many times, so I made a plan to do something creative. I read about one of my fellow teaching students making brochures for informational writing. Then I thought about a night when my roommates and I just cut and collaged pictures. So I followed up my teacher’s nature cycle lesson with another one. The students cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them into a continuous cycle. This took the place of their pre-writing stage and they wrote a draft describing their cycle. They loved the change of pace using scissors and glue and pictures. It made their opportunity to write a little more exciting. I had no issues in either of the two classes about using scissors correctly or cleaning up. They behaved very well and stayed on task. I was nearly as excited as they were to do something different, and I loved the cycles they turned out.

Successful day- November 22

I went over some of the difficult parts of the math test with our push-in class. The students had a hard time making statements of comparisons from a bar graph because we had practiced asking the questions so much. I asked them some of the same questions and taught them how to answer them with a statement. Then we went over Venn diagrams and the key words that gave clues as to which parts were being compared. Some key words are inclusive and require information from more than one part of the diagram. Other key words indicate only one part is to be considered. The teacher said I did a great job with speaking up and asking good questions. It was a good impromptu lesson. The students gave good answers and seemed to understand it better.

In Language Arts, I was teaching again. I was pretty excited about this lesson. This was another pronouns lesson introducing the possessive. We reviewed subject and object pronouns first (although I could have skipped a bit of those slides because they got those concepts). They really caught on to most of the possessives after a few examples of sentences with subject or object pronouns in those places. I made a special example of “ours” and “theirs” and explained it after one question confused a couple students on the worksheet. My professor liked several of the things I did with the lesson, especially pointing out the two they had trouble with and identifying the difference. Lastly, I had written a first person account of the First Thanksgiving. At set points in the story, there were two options for the pronoun that would fit in the sentence and they were to circle the correct one. They did so well!

Perfectionism- Nov. 16

I am a perfectionist with an incredible memory for details and rules. I like for things to be right, and I frequently think "right" equals "my way."The hardest part of helping teach this class is watching the teacher go over the examples. Sometimes she accidentally gives the students bad information. Today in subject and verb discussions, the phrase in question was "Wool from goats..." The teacher told them the subject was goats when it was actually wool because the subject cannot be in a prepositional phrase. The subject cannot be in a prepositional phrase. She also doesn't include the helping verb as part of the total verb. They are all little things that may be corrected by future teachers, but it is so hard for me not to keep correcting her. I know that to keep correcting her would harm her credibility to the students. I just have a hard time letting her give incorrect feedback, even infrequently.

After some feedback from teachers, it appears this is not a huge matter. I can make sure I teach more (as I should in lab anyway) and teach it the right way. I can also dismiss most of it because I will not be in the class long, and the students will move on to other teachers anyway.

Lab Experience- Nov 7

One thing I have really noticed today is the time limit. In a regular classroom, the teacher can stretch or shorten a lesson as need and start on the next one or fill time with enrichment. As a push-in and pull-out teacher, we have to fit the entire lesson within a certain amount of time and any extra has to flow into the next day. Interest has to be built up again and the basics reviewed. I barely finished the math worksheet with my group before I had to leave the push-in class, and some of the second grade language arts students needed additional explanations of some words they didn't know just to complete their work. The time limit is one potential obstacle that ESOL teachers have to consider in planning and executing their lessons.

Predictable Routines in the Classroom

In our ESOL Methods class, we study several things that help us guide the students toward success. Some of these things are not even content; rather, they are procedures and routines that are consistently used with the students and allow them to participate in the classroom no matter what their language proficiency. Here is a graphic organizer presenting some of them.

Things you don't Learn about Teaching in College

Top Ten with David Letterman... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lulUvYfRl_c
Things that could be a little scary or make one apprehensive about teaching. Most of these didn't bother me. I am a little apprehensive about the last two, the principal's office and the superintendent. Especially since the superintendent in my county was my high school principal! That could definitely be a little scary. How prepared can you be to have a visit (or worse, an observation) from the top man?
Honestly, it may not be that bad. We have about four observations per month in our labs.
The other thing that makes me apprehensive about starting to teach is wondering how prepared I will be to start teaching. Will my classroom really be ready? Will there be that one thing I forgot or overlooked that I really need?
We'll see!!

Lab Experience- Week 1

I am pretty excited about this month and my opportunity to be in a classroom, learning and teaching. So far, I have met the second graders we pull out for Language Arts. I have also identified a few of the ESL students in third grade math. We push-in for that class so they are not separate. It is pretty easy to see where we are in teaching the curriculum and the vocabulary of each lesson. The teacher reviews at the beginning of each class then scaffolds the new information for the day. She does it in a different way each day too. Yesterday we only used chart paper. Today we used the ActivBoard. With another student as well as myself and the teacher, we are well able to focus instruction on one or two students each. I have enjoyed my first two days in this class. It didn't take much observing to acclimate to the teacher's style and process.
I also get to see my first graders from the beginning of the year very frequently. I have stepped in during reading time and observed and answered a couple questions at times. I like seeing the progress they have made since I left their class after the first week.

WebQuest

I was introduced to Web Quests last year. They can be so fun! They are very well set up for discovery learning. In one of my classes, I had to write my own Web Quest. My topic was the lunar tides.
Recently, I added some specifications on the Teacher's Page for instruction to ESL students. These specifications are made at a developing language proficiency level.

This is the link to my Web Quest:
http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=92942

Did you know?

     The time it takes for information to travel around the globe continually gets smaller. The time it takes to invent something to shorten travel time continually gets smaller. The number of people on the earth continually gets larger. All of these things affect our lives and how we train those who will follow our lead.
     Some of these things can be shown in the example statistics of the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Dhmg6vcXQ&feature=related.
     All of these things affect how I will teach. What if one of my students goes into a job that does not exist yet and that I know nothing about? My job changes from training them for a job to teaching them how to think and to solve problems. They need to know how and when and where to use today's technology so that they can learn tomorrow's.
     How do I go about that? What do I teach?
The first rule in using technology is to take care of it. Handle it carefully and gently. Learn the functions of each piece. These could include media players, interactive boards, projectors, and cameras.
The second rule of using technology is to use each kind for its function. Some have more than one, but they are used for only that function.
     I especially look forward to using media players for reading and listening centers. Hopefully, I can introduce my students to a number of new and exciting sounds, pictures, and videos. I want to allow my students to find and add things to the collection already stored. I want to have a digital camera just for my classroom. It can be a management tool as well if the use of it is a reward for good work or behavior.
     Projectors and interactive boards are often paired, though some projectors can be used alone. The interactive board is a multi-function board in that it can be used to display and manipulate information, play fun and educational games, show videos, enlarge activities, and create presentations. I can do flip charts, Power Points  slide shows, Internet videos and games. It can be a center if there is something already loaded that two or three students can work on.
     Technology integration will help me prepare my students for the world they will live in and teach them how to use technology for the tools it enhances.

5 Helpful sites for Teachers

We had an assignment to publish 5 websites that would include good teacher tools. Some of these I had used before and really like, like the Clutter Free Classroom blog. Some I went and looked up and will be bookmarking for future use.

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/home.jsp

http://clutterfreeclassroom.blogspot.com/

http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/index.htm

http://www.englishraven.com/teachertools_main.html

http://www.esl-galaxy.com/worksheetmakers.htm

http://www.eslflow.com/ToolsforTeacher.html

Philosophy of Teaching ESOL

I'm not sure if my philosophy for teaching ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) will be much different from my philosophy for teaching mainstream classrooms. I think the basics of activities and content will remain mostly the same; activities will be geared toward active participation in learning. Most activities will be measurable and produce something that demonstrates the students knowledge. ESOL students should be treated just like other students and held to the same standards of behavior, even if more time has to be spent explaining and demonstrating the expectations. Every child should receive positive feedback for things done well and instruction for things that need improvement. ESOL students enjoy music and movement and crafts as much as a typical English-speaking student.
I will know little, if any, of the ESOL student's first language, so the student will experience immersion in an English speaking environment. I hope that if I know some of the language I can use it to help demonstrate interest in learning language and cooperating with expectations.