My First Week of Student Teaching

After one week working in a primary resource room I am really beginning to love it. The kids are so cute and so eager to learn that it makes every day a fun and exciting experience. I have decided to use my kindergarten reading group for my work sample. Of all my groups this is the one that I feel I can add to the current curriculum and not through their whole program off. The first and second graders that I work with have been using a direct instruction curriculum sense the beginning of the year and it would be hard for me to add my own ideas to these groups without upsetting the students academic growth. I am using my talents to change tedious lessons into games or other fun activities. I still believe that when done right the best way to educate students is by using direct instruction and adding other activities to keep things interesting. I want to bring books, rhyming games. and other attention getting activities to all my reading groups. I want the give the students the gift of enjoying books so that they will work hard to become better readers. I want to bring fun activities to my math groups as well, but I am finding this harder to do. I want to look for some ideas on hands on math. One of my students only wants to add. He doesn't quite get the minus means going backward. When I gave them a add/subtract test, I could hear him saying the problems to himself. "Five plus three equals...five, six, seven, eight," he said for the first problem. "Six minus four equals...six, seven, eight, nine, ten," was his response to problem number two. No matter the problem he always counted up. So I tried working with the number line, but it is too early to see if that is helping. He has some behaviors and is short on attention so it may take some time to get him to understand the difference between adding and subtracting. I think this week I will add in some manipulatives too see if that might help. In my other math group I have one student who is on the spectrum. On Thursday he decided that he was only going to say and write numbers that ended with eight. I did my best to come up with add and subtract problems that ended in eight. The problem came when he had to complete his progress monitoring assessment. On the first side he wrote eights on every answer, so this was not a good measure of his abilities. On side two I told him he could have a Sponge Bob sticker for each problem he wrote the right answer to. I had to give him eight Sponge Bob Stickers.