Vacation time

Hi everyone,
It's been a long time since I responded on this. I hope everyone is having a great week. This week is vacation for all the students and teachers, so I used this time to go home and visit my parents, which has been wonderful. I have also been planning for next week. Next week, the students in Mr. Weafer's fourth grade classroom will be starting biographies. I have the amazing opportunity of teaching this unit, which I am very excited/nervous about. The first day will just be an introduction, and we, as a class will brainstorm what a biography is and the components of a biography. This unit will be a 2-3 week unit, and each student will be responsible for reading a biography. I will give them options and will supply a variety of books for the students to pick, and then the students will read these, sometimes at home. The students will be doing a big project for this unit, which will be a multi-genre paper. In this multi-genre paper, students will have the opportunity to use the research they have done on their specific person to compile different writing examples. By doing this, students will make artifacts (writing samples) that show their knowledge of biographies and the components of biographies in a fun and engaging way. They will do a timeline, biopoems, letters, and other writing formats to share their information with the class, and they will be able to dress up as their person. The last day of the unit, the students will present their information and go through an interview, pretending to be the famous person. What I will tell the students is that someone wants to write a biography on them (acting as the famous people) and they have to compile a bunch of writing samples and artifacts that I can use to write this biography. They will share a couple of the examples they have, and they will answer questions that the teacher asks them. I can't wait for this experience, and I truly hope the students enjoy it!

Week of Febuary 1st

Hi everyone. I am sorry for being so late to keep you updated this week. This last week was a bit crazy since we had a snowday on Wednesday and then my mentor teacher and I were not in class on Friday because we had a meeting to go to. The beginning of this week started off like the past weeks, and students did the usual classes. I taught on Tuesday, teaching a lesson on Ou/Ow spelling with words that have the sound owwww in them. It went really well, and the students did a word sort to help them organize the words. Everyone seemed to have fun with this activity, and when I assessed them (I had them fill out an exit card), they all seemed to understand this. Then, on Thursday, I taught another lesson, this one on geography of Maine. I focused on the counties of Maine, and students had to cut out counties from a map, and put them on a play dough map that we made in class. It was a fun activity, although very sticky, but the maps looked really cool, and I think the students had a good time. On Monday, we will finish the geography lesson on the counties. Students also had the NAEP tests on Thursday, which took most of the morning on Thursday. The students were great though, alhtough I think they were relieved that it was over and no wonder, it was almost two hours long. Students had a shortened period of math because of this this, and they learned about subtracting fractions, which they will continue on Monday.
That is pretty much all that is different in the class now. Our Maine unit has just started, so we have just scratched the surface at this point. I think students will also be starting a new unit in math soon, so that will be exciting. Next week, I am going to finish teaching my lesson on counties, and I wll also lead a discussion on the book the students are reading, The Owl in My Shower,, discussing summarizing and how we summarize. Through this lesson, students will learn how piece together the main facts of a story. Then, on Friday, I will try my hand at teaching math, although I do not know what the topic will be yet.
Anyway, I hope you are having a fantastic weekend, and I will see you again next week.