Saturday, March 7, 2009

Preinternship

So much to do and so little time in a day!

Well going into the school the first few days I was still nervous and didn't know what was expected of me. Now... I am alot more comfortable. I am learning more about the students in my class and my coop teacher. I am learning so many new things and trying them out. I learned how to do benchmarking and dolch words for reading and will try my own guided reading group next week. I am also teaching my unit and it has changed so much that I will have two units when I am finished.

I have to say that I am finding many things that my coop teacher does that I will take with me and I know that there are many other things that I would do differently as well. But things are going much better than I anticipated. I am trying to be very open and observe the things that are happening within the classroom.

The last couple weeks of classes are being highlighted in my classroom. The Wong video is one of those things that I am finding to be highlighted the most. I believed that my classroom was very structured, and it is, but they are established routines. The students could perform them without the teacher present. The first 45 minutes of the day are all established routines and they know what happens during that time period. They also know what the signals are for different activities. When the timer goes off, how to get ready for lunch, etc.

I have also learned that praising is a very powerful classroom management tool. They want to do better to get chosen to do an activity. This is behaviourist but it works.

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