Week 4

The fourth week at Watson lived up to all of the expectations I had for it. I wanted it to be as great as the first three were, and I believe it may have been better. I feel as if a lot of my students are starting to respect me more and more as each day passes. One thing that I think is a strong point of mine is, in a way, getting on the students level. I like to think of things from their perspective when I am teaching. What would they like to be doing in math? What spelling activities could work for them? etc.. I think that students learn best when they are interested in what they are learning. I have said this since I started training to be a teacher, and I will live by this for the rest of my career. For my action research I want to implement spelling activities into our classroom to see if that helps with some of their spelling test scores. Every day I try to see what the students are interested in. Do they like hands on activities more, or technology, or maybe even paper and pencil? I want to see what works for them, so I can help them to the best of my ability. I am excited to get started on my study.

As for other things that I have been noticing in Mrs. Decker's room, I really like the way that we select students to answer questions. Mrs. Decker has a mug filled with popsicle sticks with each students name on one. While working through our lessons, we select volunteers to answer questions by pulling out sticks. I have always wanted to try this, but I never have, and I have never seen it used in a classroom. I absolutely love it, and these popsicle sticks are my best friend when I am teaching. It keeps every student on task, and paying attention while they work. You would think that it was magic the way this works. I am very happy that I got to see Mrs. Decker use this strategy so I could implement it into my lessons. Week 5 starts tomorrow, and my teaching load increases a little more, so needless to say, I'm very excited to get going again.