Beginning Week Two...

Week One was successful! I am very happy to report that I survived and already have learned a lot.

This week, I will take over mornings, which basically means I go over Bell Work and teach during the language art period, from about 8:45-9:45. The kids have specials after that, so that is a nice time for my classroom teacher (CT from here on out) and I to debrief. Today I did a Sitton paragraph with the students. Like I mentioned before, the kids in my class are fairly advanced for 3rd graders, so I chose to do one of the end-of-the-unit activities with them. Basically, Sitton goes over high frequency words and comes with a lot of helpful activities, worksheets, and mini-lessons. I hadn't ever heard of it before last week, but I really like it. The worksheet we did today was a paragraph with a bunch of blanks. I put a word bank up on the whiteboard, and the kids filled in the blanks with their table groups. Usually, the students work well with each other. We changed their groups around this morning, though, and I could tell that some groups were having a harder time getting along than others. Two boys in particular were practically at each other's throats the whole time; I finally had to stop the lesson a little short to prevent them from getting too frustrated with each other. I thought that the answer was moving them away from each other, but my CT disagreed. I learned that sometimes you have to let kids work out their problems; the reality is that they will have to learn how to work with other students eventually, so why not start early? These two boys are VERY smart, but they are both rather opinionated and don't listen to others well, so I'm hoping that they can learn from being sat next to each other. My CT said that if by mid-week they are still having arguments and disagreements, we will talk to them during some free time during the day. We'll see how that goes!!
Tomorrow I'm going to teach them about adverbs. We're going to do an anchor chart together and then I have a worksheet for them. On Wednesday, my supervisor is coming for her first observation, and I'm going to create an activity that goes over adjectives and adverbs. Hopefully both go well, though I will say that I'm nervous for the lessons...I'm not entirely sure why.

One more thing before I go. We had a team meeting after school today to look at a new textbook program for reading and writing next year. I'm finding that they rely a lot on their textbooks. I feel like a lot of my classes in college have been so insistent on not using textbooks. We've been taught to create our own lessons because textbooks really aren't good. So...I've been thinking a lot about that lately. Are textbooks bad? Should teachers be expected to create their own lessons? Hopefully I'll come up with an answer to those questions by the end of this semester. 

Well..I think that's about it for now. Crossing my fingers that tomorrow goes well!!