In the darkness

Earth Hour 2009.  I had not heard of Earth Hour before my science class last Thursday.  What a great idea; one hour with the lights off.  My whole family was prepared and ready to participate in earth hour.  On Saturday morning Briana and Garrick made some posters to put up on our front window and door.  Briana had participated in a school wide Earth Hour on Friday afternoon so she already knew what it was about.  Garrick is only 3 so he did not have a clue but he was enjoying himself.  Michelle and I decided we were going to participate but the question what what could we do to keep the kids entertained with for an hour in the dark?  I thought of starting a fire and making smores.  Then we decided that that was too much sugar when we wanted the kids to go to bed shortly after.  Then we decided we could make bush pies in the fireplace.  So we ran out to the store and picked up the necessary ingredients.  Sandwich (square) bread, cream cheese, pie filling, and of course a bush pie iron.  A bush pie is some filling between two pieces of bread which is then put into the iron and cooked in the fire.  In the end you get a small personal pie because the edges of the bread are squished together creating a pocket with filling in it.  We used apple and cherry pie filling but you can use anything you would like.

It was great.  We sat around the fire with some candles burning and we just enjoyed each others company.  The kids had never seen bush pies before so they thought that it was great to cook in the fireplace and have desert in the darkness.  It was fun; no kids arguing, only laughter with some silence.  All around it was a great experience.  One that reminded me of camping and how much I miss the sitting around the fire, in the darkness, in the wilderness.  I am so glad that it is spring soon because we are getting into prime camping season.

Darin

End of the Block

What are some of the things I have learned from my three week block?

Teaching is exhausting both physically but mostly mentally.

Planning is important but things do not always end up the way you planned.

There is never enough time.

Just because a bunch of lessons fail in a row does not mean you can not do the job.

Plans work and fail depending on the kids that day.

Kids have wild imaginations and can take you places you never thought possible.

Those are just a few things that popped into my head right now.  There are more but I would end up writing forever.  Teaching is exhausting; after three days of being in a classroom full time my brain hurt and my body hurt.  By the end of the three weeks I was starting to feel comfortable with standing all day, but by the end of every day I did not want to think anymore.  On three different days with three different teachers I was told that I should be mentally exhausted at the end of a day because the average teacher makes about five thousand decisions everyday.  Knowing that did not help my exhaustion but I definitely could see that many decisions are possible and would make my head hurt.

I planned the crap out of my unit before I went into the classroom and after the first couple of days I realized that most of it was not going to work the way I had planned it.  I had to redo everything I had planned on a daily basis.  I can not imagine having to do that for every subject; I will never get any sleep.  The plus is the I was getting quicker at planning lessons by the end of the three weeks.

I never had enough time for any of my lessons.  I have come to the conclusion that I was planning too much for too short of a time.  I had so much I wanted to accomplish with the kids but I just did not have enough time.  I am sad about that but I only had three weeks with them and that is not really that much time in the big picture.  I can not have them experience everything.

I spent time questioning my teaching abilities because I had many lessons fail in a row.  But I was trying a lot of stuff that was new to the kids that I should have thought about more closely.  I now see that there is a lot of base knowledge in procedures and such that have to be modeled very slowly at the beginning.  I can not expect that students will get things right away and be able to preform a task that should have been modeled for weeks before.  Lessons also failed because the kids were just not cooperating with the lesson on that day.  The lesson, with proper set up, would probably succeed on a different day.

My students’ imaginations blew me away in the blogging stories.  All the stories went to places I did not even imagine when I thought up the project.  There were some minor problems with the blogging but I call it a huge success.  I know what I would do it differently next time and I know that I will have to allow for more time to write, edit, and represent, but the students loved the blogging.  On my last day they made cards for Andrea and myself and three quarters of them mentioned how much they loved the blogging.  To allow them to experience blogging when most of them had not heard of it before was a great experience for me.  From there cards and in things they said I know that it was a great experience for them too.  I will take what I learned with the blog and be able to make a blog in internship that is even more successful.

In the end I learned that I can teach, but I still have more learning to do.

Darin

Pre-intern Block

I was supposed to post a reflection at the end of each week of my block, but I have been so busy that I totally forgot about last weeks.  I will discuss both weeks in one.

My first week was okay but I did have some problems.  I am going to start with the blogging.  My first day was an introduction to blogging and it went good.  The kids were extremely excited about the blog and are having a lot of fun creating their stories.  At the end of the first week I realized that we just did not have enough time for the blogging.  I only had fifteen minutes per day for the kids to review the story and then write their additions to the story and this was just not enough time.  I talked to Mrs. Walker and she said that I could ask the six kids I was blogging with per day if they would like to stay in at recess; this would give them half an hour worth of blogging time.

I am teaching a language arts unit on stories to learn from.  We are not only answering questions about the stories but also figuring out what the lessons are that the stories are trying to teach.  By the end of the second lesson, which was day three, I realized that I had started to quickly with the students and was expecting more than they could do without really modeling it for them.  I guess you could say I learned the hard way that I have to teach them first exactly what I want and model it for them not just tell them what I want.  I ended the four-day week with a teacher in role drama based of “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs”.  The drama went very well and the kids enjoyed it.  The only down fall was that I ran out of time and was not able to do the tableau with the students.  I was upset about this because I was going to film them and put them up on the blog.  I know now to plan more time next time.  Because the kids were not getting what I was trying to teach, what I had planned for week two was not going to work so I had to re-plan the whole second week.  I was upset and questioning if I could even do the job because not only were the students not getting it, but I was also not finishing my lessons.  Between the mental and physical exhaustion at the end of the day and the late nights making adjustments to my lessons I was on the verge of breaking down.

I must look at the positives of the week though.  The kids are loving the blogging and the stories are turning out better then I imagined, and I stepped completely out side of my personal comfort zone to do the teacher in role drama and it went well.  Andrea told me after that my voice was even shaking at the beginning of the drama; I was crapping myself at that point though!

Week two started with a review of the previous weeks lessons.  I was having some problems with my pacing and was not able to make it through my lesson again.  At the same time I was also having classroom management issues.  This added to my frustration and I continued to question my teaching abilities.

Tuesday was stories on video day.  I had three aboriginal trickster tales that I wanted to get through with the kids.  The videos were very short and they only needed to answer three or four questions per video.  I planned the crap out of the lesson; I did not want to feel like a failure after another lesson.  The videos helped to keep the interest of the students and we went through the questions together so that they knew exactly what I was looking for.  The lesson went very well.  I was in need of a successful lesson to build up my confidence again; it really did help me refocus.

Now that my confidence was built back up a bit I felt that I could actually accomplish the jigsaw activity I had planned for the next two days.  Let me start out by saying that we had indoor recess everyday so far this week.  Day one of the jigsaw went not too bad.  Day two was a different story.  My lesson ended up being split before and after recess.  Before recess was a complete management disaster.  After recess I regrouped, made some adjustments and told the kids that if things started to get like they were before recess I was going to pull the plug and direct teach them the information.  They lasted fifteen minutes and I pulled the plug.  I told them sorry but it just was not working.  I tried something knew and there was no way it was going to work that day.  The lesson did fail, but I did learn a lot from it.  I also thought of many ways to make adjustments for next time.  I was also very happy that I was me that was the more critical about the lesson than Mrs. Walker.  It almost looked like she was laughing at me as my lesson was sinking.  I told her the same thing I told the kids; I tried something new and if just did not work today.

Positive sides of this week.  Blogging is going great (other than the one day with no internet), I do not feel like a failure as a teacher, and I tried something new and lived to talk and laugh about it.  I hope that next week will end on a positive note as well.

Darin

My Students Blogging

As part of my three week block in my pre-internship I am having my students do some blogging.  I decided to start small with the students because they have little computer experience and I only have three weeks to do it in.  I have split the students into six explorer teams and given them all the same story seed.  Everyday six students will have an opportunity to add to the story.  Where will their stories go?

I would appreciate it if you could visit the blog regularly until March 20, 2009, which is my last day of my block.  Please leave some comments for the students.

Thank you in advance,

Darin