Today marks the beginning of my fourth week in my general education placement! This is the week before "mid-point" since there 10 weeks in each placement (special education and general) and there are a lot of assignments that I'm working on. I have to put up 2 bulletin boards, create a substitute binder, write about three classroom procedures/routines. There is probably more that I'm forgetting, but oh well! Maybe next time! In the last week I recently picked up Math along with Shared Reading and Read-Alouds.
Math is not so bad, but I haven't quite mastered think-alouds to my lead teacher's liking. She usually interrupts my lesson (before I've even moved on!) and will provide more examples. Sometimes this is annoying, but honestly I've thought about it and I'm just being grumpy- obviously she knows what the kids need and I'm learning! We teach math out of a Houghton Mifflan book- chapter by chapter (we also teach reading/phonics with Houghton Mifflan...). The kids seem to get it, mostly. There are of course, some obvious strugglers, but they receive extra help from aides and the teacher.
Shared Reading is this daily activity where the kids sit on the carpet and learn a song, poem, or read a big book. They come with pre-made lessons that create goals like learning how to question the author, making inferences, and using pictures or headings to interpret the text. It's not bad and the kids like the songs. We usually do read-alouds first thing in the morning, so they're either really interested, or, really NOT!
For Read-alouds, we have to select books from a list of "mentor texts" which are boring and terrible books pre-selected by some "expert" in the district because they model certain styles or genres of writing (example: personal narrative, descriptive writing, etc.). So far the worst book that I've read was My Mother Has a Dancing Heart by Libba Moore Gray....LAME!!!! Sorry, it could be the best children's book ever, but in my opinion it was the most terrible book I had ever read ("it has rhythm," my lead teacher said). They really like authors like Donald Crews, Cynthia Rylant, and others are frequent flyers of this "mentor text" thing. If I can't be interested, how could the kids possibly love this stuff- FYI they hated that book, too.
*In case you were wondering, the title of this entry was determined by a letter a student wrote to their mother after my lead teacher caught him chewing a pencil eraser. Gross!
**Another gross thing: another kid can almost move his front tooth a full 360 degrees! It creeped me out!!!
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