I'm not totally sure how I got to sixteen weeks and still have two days left next week when I only needed 25 days each place, but I guess it matters little. I've had a couple days off for various things here and there, so I still have monday and tuesday of next week until I'm completely done. Do I need to post again then?
I taught all the kindergarten and first grade classes this week, which was pretty fun, because I love reading to the little ones! It's very much play time to me as well as teaching skills, and I love the way the kids will lean in and get really drawn into the story. I especially love it when they forget to be quiet because they get SO excited about some connection they made, whether or not it looks on the surface like it's got anything to do with the story. :) Mary Ann has been working with both grades on a lot of Caldecott winners lately, so for kindergarten I paired Kitten's First Full Moon with Millions of Cats (one of my favorites, and not a Caldecott book but a Newbery honor). With a longer class period, or maybe in my own library where the kids already knew me and were less focused on figuring out who the heck was reading to them, I'd like to do a lot of rhythm and participation stuff with Millions of Cats, but at the present we just had a good time reading/listening to it. For first grade I did Silvester and the Magic Pebble for an award winner, and paired with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day mostly because I just love the latter for that age, and the pairing worked okay because Silvester had a bad day too! I experimented some with the first graders, depending on the class's group dynamics and whether they got there on time, on whether they got both books or whether they just got Alexander, and which order they went in. I did a short biography thing along with Alexander, so a couple classes had more emphasis on that, plus a personal story of a bad day I had had. My best success, with least chaos at the end of the period, was to skip the personal story, read both books, with Silvester (much longer) first, but I still went back to the Alexander-only way with one class, which was ten minutes late, had a sub, and was pretty off-the-wall.
I also did some more of the flute program this week. I've been really impressed with how well those kids will sit and listen to Debussy, with just a little explanation! It just emphasizes to me the fact that classical music isn't irrelevant; classical musicians have just made themselves irrelevant and failed their audiences, when they expect people to adore their art just because it's art music and they said so. That is a soapbox of mine. :) Anyway, so that went well, and we've been trying to get AR stuff ready for the end of the year, and that's pretty much what we've done this week. Oh, and I've been going through Mary Ann's files in the afternoons and copying all her ideas, hehe, especially orientation things so that I have some ideas to start from if I get an elementary school. It's really helpful to me just to have an example of how a multi-lesson unit plan is put together, even if I never use that particular lesson.
Friday, May 1, 2009
student teaching week fifteen
This was another shortened week for me. Monday I took half the day and went to Whitesburg to talk to a principal there, and today (friday) I've been at the pre-conference for the Celebration of Latino Children's Literature in Columbia, SC. A first-year student and I are presenting at the full conference tomorrow. My favorite session here so far has been a *fabulous* storyteller who told bilingual stories; one idea I plan to steal from her, in case any of y'all want to steal it too, is that instead of using a basket or bag or apron to hide her props till she wanted to pull them out, she used a ginormous steel bucket, which meant that she could also use that bucket to make sound effects.
I got to do my flute and stories program this week with three classes of fourth graders, which was pretty fun. They were very good listeners and asked some good questions. The first piece I did was a story from Greek mythology, and it was kinda cute that when I asked what characters they already knew, you could immediately tell who'd been reading Rick Riordan's books. :) Next week I'm going to teach all the kindergarten and first grade classes. Mary Ann's been doing Caldecotts with the kindergartens, so I'm going to pair Millions of Cats and Kitten's First Full Moon for them, and then I'm doing Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day for first, just because I love it for that age.
And we enjoyed seeing Marion on thursday!
I got to do my flute and stories program this week with three classes of fourth graders, which was pretty fun. They were very good listeners and asked some good questions. The first piece I did was a story from Greek mythology, and it was kinda cute that when I asked what characters they already knew, you could immediately tell who'd been reading Rick Riordan's books. :) Next week I'm going to teach all the kindergarten and first grade classes. Mary Ann's been doing Caldecotts with the kindergartens, so I'm going to pair Millions of Cats and Kitten's First Full Moon for them, and then I'm doing Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day for first, just because I love it for that age.
And we enjoyed seeing Marion on thursday!
student teaching week fourteen
Arbuthnot tomorrow!
This week we had inservice on monday, mostly normal day on tuesday, and started TCAPs wednesday, with testing through next monday. Mornings have been pretty quiet with no open access during testing, so we've been working on the A/V inventory. We did have the normal k-1 classes wednesday and thursday morning, since they weren't testing, but today Mary Ann had to test and Kellie (the assistant) had to proctor, so we shut down. Somehow or other I didn't make it onto the list to proctor (I did not complain), so I just hung out in the library workroom and did a bunch of processing on some new books.
In the afternoons we've had a pretty busy schedule of classes signing up to come in for lessons, which seemed kinda odd. I had planned out a little program to do some storytelling along with playing flute and we were going to offer it to people to sign up to give their kids a nice break after testing, and they are still welcome to sign up for it sometime if they want, but there was a sudden swarm of people wanting actual skill review lessons (story structure, genres, sequencing, that kind of thing) that filled up the week for the most part, even though those kids were in tests all morning. It seems like too little too late to me, to be suddenly wanting to review test topics the week of the test, but we're glad to have them in any time of course. I've been watching those and stealing all Mary Ann's ideas in between taking over the desk stuff. That's worked out really well to get some practice at, because I already knew how to run circulation and I already knew how to shelve, but doing it all at the same time as well as helping kids and teachers find things in a library that busy is an entirely different task. Other than that, not too much new to report this week.
This week we had inservice on monday, mostly normal day on tuesday, and started TCAPs wednesday, with testing through next monday. Mornings have been pretty quiet with no open access during testing, so we've been working on the A/V inventory. We did have the normal k-1 classes wednesday and thursday morning, since they weren't testing, but today Mary Ann had to test and Kellie (the assistant) had to proctor, so we shut down. Somehow or other I didn't make it onto the list to proctor (I did not complain), so I just hung out in the library workroom and did a bunch of processing on some new books.
In the afternoons we've had a pretty busy schedule of classes signing up to come in for lessons, which seemed kinda odd. I had planned out a little program to do some storytelling along with playing flute and we were going to offer it to people to sign up to give their kids a nice break after testing, and they are still welcome to sign up for it sometime if they want, but there was a sudden swarm of people wanting actual skill review lessons (story structure, genres, sequencing, that kind of thing) that filled up the week for the most part, even though those kids were in tests all morning. It seems like too little too late to me, to be suddenly wanting to review test topics the week of the test, but we're glad to have them in any time of course. I've been watching those and stealing all Mary Ann's ideas in between taking over the desk stuff. That's worked out really well to get some practice at, because I already knew how to run circulation and I already knew how to shelve, but doing it all at the same time as well as helping kids and teachers find things in a library that busy is an entirely different task. Other than that, not too much new to report this week.
student teaching week thirteen
Fairly short week for me this week; I left right at the end of school on wednesday for TLA and spent thursday and friday at the conference. Managed to not get sucked into a tornado, but things were a little spooky there for a while in that part of the state. :) If you've got thoughts on the extremely low participation in TLA from school librarians, I'd sure like to hear them, because that's something I'd like to help work on, provided I can continue living and working in Tennessee. The conference programming for school libraries was pretty low, I'm sure because the general participation for that crowd is so low, but I also wonder if that's exactly *why* the participation is so low. As the program was, if I was looking at having to pay conference fees out of pocket and could only afford one, I'd pick TASL over TLA every time because of the sessions offered. However, I think TLA is extremely important for school librarians because those non-k-12 sessions are where you can learn things that help move you forward, whereas most of what was offered at TASL were things that would help you get better at what you're already doing, not getting innovative. So I'd like to work on the problem of how to get more school people involved in TLA, but I don't know what the answer is currently, or even exactly what causes the problem. I don't think it's that school people just can't get away from their jobs to attend a conference, because participation in TASL is huge.
We worked on making materials for a lesson on sequencing to use as a TCAP review with third graders this week, which was fun. I helped Mary Ann make a classroom set of several copies for her library, and then I made a set of one copy for myself, which worked out great because I could learn how she does things and then try out slightly different ways of doing it on my own copy. We started the project because the teachers were coming to Mary Ann saying their students were having trouble with things that told a story (assume for example that this is a story about Tom) then gave questions that looked like this:
1. Tom walked home.
2. Tom ran to the barn.
3. Tom fell asleep.
4. Tom ate breakfast.
What is the correct order of events in the story?
a) 1324
b) 2431
c) 4213
d) 3241
The kids were having a lot of trouble using the numbers to label the events and then putting them in something other than numerical order. So we took file folders and put cover art using real books (so that it was also a literature lesson) on the front, then opened the inside and put a typed copy of the text of the story on the left side side and a sheet on the right with numbered events and questions about them, phrased as closely to the TCAP questions as we could get them. Then on the back we put envelopes. We made little strips of paper with the numbered events on them that the kids could physically move into the right order, and that way they had a tactile and visual way of putting them into sequence to help them answer the questions, and the strips were kept in the envelopes on the back. We also put answer keys on them, and that was the main change I made when my set; Mary Ann pasted them on backs of the folders, but I wanted to try a way to cover them and make cheating harder, so I made little tri-fold construction paper things with the answers inside and put them in the envelopes along with the event strips. We made three copies each of ten stories that way.
Then for the actual lessons we started with a whole group reading "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud, then did a practice set using giant-sized event strips that kids stood up and held and moved around into order, so that everybody did one together. Then we put them at tables with five folders at each table and let them practice with partners. They could work at their own pace, check themselves with the answer keys, and then just move on to another folder for as much time as we had. If they were to run out of folders on the table (nobody did in the 45 minute class period), they could move to a table with a different set of five (we split the ten stories into A and B sets to make it easier to make sure we were getting them to different sets of stories). The kids worked together really well and seemed to benefit from the practice, so we're waiting to hear back from teachers about whether they're seeing any improvement.
That's a really long discourse on those folders, but they are going to be a super useful way to make lesson materials that can be used every year (we laminated everything to last longer), and anybody's welcome to holler at me if they want to come see my set. Just wanted to share.
Other than that, I've been working on a program to use my flute to help tell some stories. We were originally hoping to market this as an afternoon thing teachers could sign up for to give their kids a mental break after TCAP testing in the mornings, but the teachers are actually signing up for real lessons during those afternoons (which seems like too little too late, because they haven't been signing up much at all in the last two weeks), so we'll see if and when anybody wants to come in for just some music and stories. Maybe it can make a post-TCAP treat for somebody.
We worked on making materials for a lesson on sequencing to use as a TCAP review with third graders this week, which was fun. I helped Mary Ann make a classroom set of several copies for her library, and then I made a set of one copy for myself, which worked out great because I could learn how she does things and then try out slightly different ways of doing it on my own copy. We started the project because the teachers were coming to Mary Ann saying their students were having trouble with things that told a story (assume for example that this is a story about Tom) then gave questions that looked like this:
1. Tom walked home.
2. Tom ran to the barn.
3. Tom fell asleep.
4. Tom ate breakfast.
What is the correct order of events in the story?
a) 1324
b) 2431
c) 4213
d) 3241
The kids were having a lot of trouble using the numbers to label the events and then putting them in something other than numerical order. So we took file folders and put cover art using real books (so that it was also a literature lesson) on the front, then opened the inside and put a typed copy of the text of the story on the left side side and a sheet on the right with numbered events and questions about them, phrased as closely to the TCAP questions as we could get them. Then on the back we put envelopes. We made little strips of paper with the numbered events on them that the kids could physically move into the right order, and that way they had a tactile and visual way of putting them into sequence to help them answer the questions, and the strips were kept in the envelopes on the back. We also put answer keys on them, and that was the main change I made when my set; Mary Ann pasted them on backs of the folders, but I wanted to try a way to cover them and make cheating harder, so I made little tri-fold construction paper things with the answers inside and put them in the envelopes along with the event strips. We made three copies each of ten stories that way.
Then for the actual lessons we started with a whole group reading "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud, then did a practice set using giant-sized event strips that kids stood up and held and moved around into order, so that everybody did one together. Then we put them at tables with five folders at each table and let them practice with partners. They could work at their own pace, check themselves with the answer keys, and then just move on to another folder for as much time as we had. If they were to run out of folders on the table (nobody did in the 45 minute class period), they could move to a table with a different set of five (we split the ten stories into A and B sets to make it easier to make sure we were getting them to different sets of stories). The kids worked together really well and seemed to benefit from the practice, so we're waiting to hear back from teachers about whether they're seeing any improvement.
That's a really long discourse on those folders, but they are going to be a super useful way to make lesson materials that can be used every year (we laminated everything to last longer), and anybody's welcome to holler at me if they want to come see my set. Just wanted to share.
Other than that, I've been working on a program to use my flute to help tell some stories. We were originally hoping to market this as an afternoon thing teachers could sign up for to give their kids a mental break after TCAP testing in the mornings, but the teachers are actually signing up for real lessons during those afternoons (which seems like too little too late, because they haven't been signing up much at all in the last two weeks), so we'll see if and when anybody wants to come in for just some music and stories. Maybe it can make a post-TCAP treat for somebody.
student teaching week twelve
I started at Brickey-McCloud Elementary this week with Mary Ann Taylor, and I'm really enjoying it so far! Brickey has nearly 1100 students, and it's pretty affluent, almost none on free/reduced lunch. The affluence means pretty much zero discipline problems, lots of involved parents, astronomical PTO donations to the AR fund, full-color photos on all handouts at the staff meeting, parent notes coming back with library books instructing the library staff on whether books are appropriate for certain age groups, girls with Vera Bradley backpacks in the latest colors of every season, collective astonishment at the existence of a few students who aren't meeting their benchmark goals, a morning parent drop-off line that takes nearly as much time to sit through as it takes me to drive the 10 miles to get there, and other things that are completely foreign to my prior experience. It's a very nice place, just different from my much-loved little West View! I am learning how it works and how to fit in. I reckon I'm glad to have started in inner-city schools before I got here, because I feel like that might be a little easier adjustment than the other way around.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
student teaching week eleven
This was my last week at the middle school. They were doing practice TCAP testing all week, so it was pretty light on children where we were. I mostly spent it cataloging the new books Carole had pulled from the book fair and weeding. Carole is stressing just a little bit over having less time for inventory than usual, especially since she'll be out of school the week before inventory to go to the coolest workshop EVER in Memphis with me (it's from NASA and is fully funded and I'm excited), so we went on a big campaign to clear out as much stuff as possible. That stuff needed gone anyway, and this way she has more than ten boxes fewer books to scan and account for. :) Carole has been at GMS for four years now, but is still having to work pretty hard to clean up after her predecessor, who left her a seriously crummy nonfiction section. Too many things over there are ancient to go around pulling things just because they're way old (there aren't enough newer sources to replace them), so I've pretty much been thumbing through almost every book to see if it still had value or not despite its age, and only pulling the ones that were out-of-date to the point of uselessness. Some of the ancient stuff was fantastic, like a series on what the world was like when a bunch of famous people were alive (John Smith, George Washington, etc.), but I also found some real jewels to pull, particularly in the American Indians section. Other than that it was pretty quiet, no big news to report. Next week is elementary school, so I'm pretty excited about that!
student teaching week ten
Yikes, y'all: week ten is getting on through the semester! I am not sure how two thirds of the semester manage to come prior to spring break, but whatever. :) So, after the break I have one week left at Gresham, and then it's on to lovely elementary school. I really like Gresham in general and have learned an awful lot from Carole, but I won't be too sorry to make the move. I like the kids (who are an absolute hoot in general) a lot better than I thought I would, but I'm growing weary of having them old enough to push your buttons in an adult way and not old enough to start figuring out when it's time to back off. This week I've had to kick kids out of the library for skipping class under the guise of helping us with circulation (we have a couple of those), confiscate a pile of Nazi symbols printed from the lab without permission, and deal with kids who are uncomfortable with the lesson material almost to the point of tears but who choose to cover it by lashing out at me and telling their teammates they suck. That's only a few of the kids, of course, and many of them are splendid, but I'm a little down about it, especially after getting a little flack for not suiting a teacher who asked me for help evaluating student work without telling me anything about what was expected of them. Note to self: never do that to anybody.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
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