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.