Working with Kids

Banana Observation Paper
Even though the class made an outline for this 4 paragraph paper together, many students still did not know how to turn the outline into a paper. Many students forgot to indent their paragraphs.

Assessment
I graded the front half of the long division worksheet that the students had for homework last night. Three students missed at least three problems. Upon seeing this, I thought it would be a good idea to pull these students as a group later, but it didn't quite work like that.

Math Leadership
I had the students to myself during snack while my host teacher ran some errands. Eventually, I decided to warm the students up for math by having the students solve problems from last night's homework on the white board. (I still had the worksheets on my desk, I wanted the students to completely rework the problems.) I had three students at the board completing three different problems, but then my host teacher walked in. I let the student who finished half of her problem finish solving it and I sent the other two students back to their seats. My host teacher seemed to like that idea, so she had the student explain how she got the answer. We spent math time having one-three students solving a problem at the white board while the other students solved the problems on their own white boards. The students seemed to like this idea. I was surprised that around half of the class was having issues with long division even though most of the class did pretty well on their homework. I wonder if this is because parents check homework.

Reading Groups
I ran the read and respond station. The students did pretty well at finding sentences that were important, but they had trouble finding the most important sentences in each paragraph. If a student chose two sentences from the same paragraph, I asked them if one of the sentences described the other.

Social Studies
I led the social studies lesson today. I read from the book, which described the terrain of southern Indiana. We discussed terms such as sink holes, caves, and knobs by making connections using our schema. The students panicked a bit when we got to the comprehension questions, so I modeled how to answer the first third of the first question.

Recces Duty
I handled a conflict that I thought might turn into a fight today. It was surprisingly well. I could tell that a student was overloaded with emotions and was in over his head so I called him and a friend over. When we got to the edge of the mulch where I had been standing, I was surrounded by five boys and another boy who was involved had run away, I decided that it would be okay to handle him later. I made sure that the panicked boy was at least an arm's length away from his friend. I told them that they needed to use their words instead of their hands because they did not want to have to go talk to the principal if they could just talk it out on their own. I tried to get him to talk to me but they all started talking at once. I assigned a line of who would speak when. It turned out to be a misunderstanding involving time and a game, the story did not really make sense to me, but it made sense to them. I was glad that the boys were able to work it out among themselves with a little guidance from me about talking about their feelings and what was going on. The other friend came up to us and was still a little unhappy. I told the others that he was not ready to play yet. Within ten minutes, they were all running around and smiling.

Record Keeping
My teacher is allowing my to check a sheet to show which students submitted homework and morning work, which is taken for a participation grade. Some students did the other side of the long division worksheet, so I graded that side so that the students could rework the problems when they rework the problems from today. Some students did word pyramids for all of their vocab words instead of just the assigned words, so I put a 24 next to the check so that I would know that they had already submitted that assignment.