Reflection

After my third time at field experience, myself and the other two IU students, were finally able to interact more with the students. Although it was simply milling around the room, making ourselves available to answer questions, it was great to be able to be thinking like a teacher. I was able to brainstorm and guide students by asking them questions about what they wanted to convey in their own papers. This was interesting to me, because rather than telling them what was right and what was wrong, I asked them questions on what they wanted, and how they would go about doing that. It was not an easy task for myself, because I do not have a great knowledgeable background on the history of Ancient Greeks. I had to put a lot of thought into what sort of ideas I was giving the students, because I wanted to make sure they were beneficial and legitimate.

Reflecting on my teaching experiences in our class, I feel that it is much more difficult to teach to a group of peers your own age, as opposed to children at an elementary age. When teaching to peers, I feel that there is a thought that they will not gain anything by what the student is teaching, when in fact it is done to benefit the person teaching the lesson. This is what we have to realize as students working to become teachers. The purpose of the lessons we teach in class, are not to provide information to our peers, but to better ourselves and allow us to gain insight on what it will be like in our future classrooms.

Week 4 class

During our craft lesson of yesterday's class, I found it really helpful that we were using the skills that we had learned, and relating them to an actual book. I am really enjoying this whole cluster, because we are learning about, and creating actual lesson plans that relate straight back to certain things (specifically books). These are tangible things that will be able to help us in our classrooms, rather than just concepts that have been helpful in past classrooms. In other courses in my time at IU, I have read stories, and memoirs of successful methods used by somewhat famous teachers, but this does not give me practice in these instances, only information. The fact that we are now using these methods to create out own, and present to small groups of students in our own classes, seems incredibly useful to all of us as future teachers.

There is one term that I have heard many times this semester that I have found very interesting. The term 'read like a writer' is something that I had never thought of before, but feel could be a great aspect to incorporate in our classrooms. When I feel I am reading something as a writer, I am analyzing a piece, and breaking it apart as to why the writer wrote it as he or she did. This can be interesting to do with students, because it could give one an insight on how the students are viewing the piece. It could be used as a way of assessment for critical analyzation by your students.

First Field Experience

Today was our first day of field experience at University Elementary! It was such a great first day despite the early start time of eight am. Because I was placed in a 2nd grade classroom at University last year, I requested 4-6th grade this time around in order to create a little variation. I was so incredibly impressed with the 6th grade classroom I was placed in. I was in the gifted room, and to be completely honest, I felt slightly intimidated by their ability levels. Today was simply an observation day in our classroom, and I enjoyed this very much. It was interesting not only to see the students and how they worked in an educational point of view, but also from a social standpoint. Last semester I took an interpersonal communication class, in which we spend a lot of time observing and analyzing many different social interactions and situations. It was so neat to be able to use those skills in the classroom today, because a class of 6th graders is something that I have not been around in so long. All around the students were just very impressive.

2nd Week thoughts

Today was our second class of the E 339 course. Today's class was great, because it allowed us to be creative and share about ourselves. I feel that sharing personal information with your peers, allows people to latch on to commonalities, and therefore feel comfortable in a classroom setting, and hopefully even an out of class setting. Our writer's notebook decoration, was a time to sort of work freely and let our minds wander because many of us are loaded down with first week assignments. It was a nice break in the day, while still being in class. Also we were able to share personal interests with our peers, which I feel opens so many doors. It allows people to say or think things such as "me too!" or "I agree". I feel that this brings students in the class closer together, because it allows them to relate on a level that is not centered around classroom ideas. Because of this, it allows all of us to become more comfortable discussing classroom ideas when the time comes for in class discussion.

On another note, I also enjoyed the discussion about spelling. Allyson and I agreed that this had been a subject that we had not yet learned about in our college courses. Spelling seems like such a simple task, almost a 'no-brainer' now, because of technology and our ability to ask others. I did not realize however, that I did not know any ways or methods to teach this to young children. It is a difficult topic, because as much as we want them to spell things correctly, we have to praise them for attempting to spell, and for putting forth the effort. These are things that we went into in today's class, and I feel like I really took something away from that.

After the first E 339 class, I will say that three hours was not nearly as frightening as I had imagined. I enjoyed the first sessions of all of my classes and look forward to this semester. I have never blogged before (w 200 being the exception), and so it is slightly confusing, and foreign to me. I hope that this experience will help me to become used to blogging, and grow to enjoy it. Reflections on today's class session: I am anxious to see how the writer's journal will turn out. I am wondering if I will grow to really enjoy it, or if I will simply think of it as another assignment. I have never kept a continuous journal of any type before, but I always seem to have a lot going on in my life, and in my head, so a way to get those thoughts out might be useful. I am also slightly apprehensive about this language arts cluster in general, because it seems to (obviously) focus a lot on reading and writing, two things that require a lot of time and effort for me in particular. Reading has never been a strong point of mine, because my mind wanders so much, it takes me triple the amount of time to read something. Hopefully because it is the main staple in each of the classes, the repetition will allow me to become better at it, and more comfortable sharing my ideas with multiple people.