Teaching

This week I am getting some great opportunities to teach. On Tuesday was my first time teaching my class by myself. As I am a teaching assistant I am usually just helping in the class: working with individual students, helping with classroom management and often taking the class to and from different classes or being in charge of them as the teachers switch. So while I am often with them for short periods of time where I get to be the "lead teacher" this was the first full 45 minute period where I got to plan and teach something. The reason behind this was the English teacher was on a field trip with his class.

So for English we are following Jolly Phonics, learning the letters and their sounds. So far we have learned 16 letters, but thanks to way too much listening to the little letter songs I think the kids actually know most of them. And can sing the songs, which they often do completely unprompted. So I did some review with them. We first read a story - Mind Your Manners BB Wolf. Quite a fun story and good for talking about manners. After I taught them a new song for practicing sounds before playing a matching game. I may regret this as it is very repetitive - fee fie fiddley ie oh, repeat repeat repreat. And then you do it with other sounds. Eg. it becomes dee die diddley ie oh. The last line is "and this time with the ___" and you say another sound. The way I did it with the class is I said a kids name and they picked a new letter. Today during snack the class started singing it and two of the girls played "teacher." So after each round they picked a quiet student to choose the next letter, just as I do. However, when one girl wasn't picking the letter they want they ended up making her change her mind.... but then again they did appoint themselves the leaders.

The lesson went really well, but at the end I was tired. It just showed how much effort it takes to keep my class on task and not running wild. Especially if they are on the carpet, it only takes a few seconds and there is mayhem. I have been trying to teach them how to respond when I clap (stop look listen and clap back) yet some of them still think they can ignore me and talk through. I swear they seem to think that they can speak German through anything we do in English...

Tomorrow I get to be teacher again - twice. The gr 5 teacher is away in the afternoon so I am teaching English for her last period. I am most likely going to camp with that class after Christmas, so have started going in Monday mornings and Friday afternoons to do some guided reading with them. This will give me another opportunity to get to know them. It was really nice of her to plan something and then go through it all with me after school today.

I also get to teach my class again. The English teacher is on a field trip, again (oh, this is the 2nd of 4 times over the next couple weeks). My teacher will also be around that period, but she asked me to go over the school mission with the class. This is going to be a challenge, because the mission is really written for the teachers. And I have to go through this complex language with my grade 1s who don't speak English that well... I added lots of pictures, hopefully that will help!

Gute Nacht!