student teaching week sixteen

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.