Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Field Experience Week 2!

The field experience is still going well. We started teaching our lessons on Monday. Monday we taught our first lesson which turned out to be nerve-wracking since our supervisor came in to watch us on our first day teaching! The lesson on Monday was about what culture is. My partner and I were extremely nervous for the lesson because we thought that the kids might have no idea what culture was and we were going to be doing a KWL sheet. Fortunately, the kids knew a lot more than we expected and basically everything went well except that, what we had planned for our 45 minute lesson got done in about 30 minutes so we had to just add to it and make stuff up on the fly. All in all it went well, but we underestimated the kids. On Tuesday, our second day we weren't as nervous or stressed, but our lesson took longer than expected. This day we were going to work on studying Utah culture. First we read a book called, "U is for Utah," which we had anticipated taking 15 minutes, but actually took about a half hour and the kids were a little bored with the book. When the book was over we told the kids about the assignment they were going to be doing which was making a page for our own ABC book on Utah Culture. There are 26 kids in the class and each was assigned to a letter to make a page for our class book. Since the book took a lot longer than expected we had to use our time for today's lesson which was cut short anyhow for an assembly to just finish up yesterday's project. A funny thing that happened though, was that after we assigned the students the letters we handed out their Utah History books and told them to look up their letter in the Index for ideas. One boy said, "this sucks!" hahaha so I just said, "thank you," then he said, "Oh... I meant that there isn't anything good in the index for my letter." I thought it was funny, but maybe it's just me. It reminded me of our classroom management teacher showing us how kids were going to respond to us, "you're gay!"...etc. Well I hope the other stuff we have planned doesn't take up too much time otherwise we won't be able to get all of our lesson plans in! So far the kids are great fun and our cooperating teacher is really nice and helpful. I am so glad that we are getting out there in the field a lot earlier than at some other schools' programs. I will be sad to go back to our classes in a week and a half. I wish we could just stay at the elementary schools in a sort of apprentice type training rather than going back to classes. Oh well, that is not how they have decided that we can earn a degree. Hope everyone else is getting to have fun and enjoy their experiences with their students! Good Luck to all.

1 comment:

MB said...

Hey Tiff, sounds like you are having fun as well. This is true I agree to only fake it to a certain extent, definantly only with the confidence as far as being a teacher goes! Hope you have a good week!