We Are Always Learning...

Today was our second day at University.  I still feel fairly new to the school environment and students, but I am slowly getting the hang of it.  I have been doing a lot of one-on-one work with a new student.  Since today's word of the day was moon, we did a lot of activities to help guide the process of understanding the meaning of the word and how it can be used in various sentences.  The second graders are learning how to use a dictionary so we started out by looking up moon in the dictionary.  It is a lot harder than one may think.  Alphabetical order is a newly learned concept for second graders so it took sometime to find the letter M and then go in alphabetical order to find mo.  Once we finished the dictionary assignment we had to construct sentences with this weeks spelling words.  Since the spelling word sentences took a chunk of time, we did not have time to write about the moon in his journal.  I think next week I may try doing the journal first.

In class today I really enjoyed sharing our craft lessons with our peers.  In my group we had a situation where two lessons that we picked to teach were the same lessons.  I learned how important it is for teachers to not get bent out of shape if their lesson doesn't go perfectly as planned.  Instead, we were able to think of an alternative to our lessons and on the spot make it work.  In a real class setting this can happen to any teacher and it was a good lesson to learn.

I think the book "Up, Up, Up, Down" was a great example of how teachers can get their students engaged in the literature.  The entire class participated and followed along with the story and we all seemed to enjoy it!

I am excited for our lessons (invitations) next week!

Marisa

"Teach a child how to think, not what to think." - Sidney Sugarman