Day One

Day Number One: 10:00-2:40 (total: 4 hours and 40 minutes)

When I walked into the third grade classroom I was a little nervous about the first day and these next three weeks. Once I walked into Nicole Wallace's classroom, and saw all the students smiling up at me. I felt completely comfortable being in the classroom, I felt like I've been here all year. As I walked in they were all sitting in a circle and were reading James and the Giant Peach. Ms. Wallace described to me that they sometimes do individual reading, small groups, or as a class reading. Right now they are doing today's reading as a class, when they read as a class Ms. Wallace assigns each student a character and whoever does not have a character, switches off being the narrator. I like this because it gives each student a chance to get more comfortable with reading out loud, and that will help them in years to come. After they read one or two chapters of the book the students write a journal response, in cursive, about what they have read that day. Ms. Wallace does not want them to summarize what they have read, but she wants them to write an opinion in letter format with and introduction (Dear Ms. Wallace, sincerely Katey), and she wants a couple of paragraphs. Today I read two students journal responses, and hopefully by the beginning of next week I will be responding to them. We then worked on phonics and they learned different ways to make the /S/ sound by using combinations like CI, S, CY,SS, CE, SC. Ms. Wallace then said words with these combinations for them to spell. After phonics they have some writing time where they are all writing their own short stories. Then each Friday Ms. Wallace brings them some snacks and each student reads one of the stories that they wrote. While the students were in lunch/recess I talked with Ms. Wallace about how I am going to teach Spanish and how I would like to incorporate that into their day. I also watched her plan out their lesson planner, I then looked at their math and phonics books so that I would have a sort of background with what Ms. Wallace is teaching them. Hopefully soon I will be able to correct the tests in math and phonics. A half an hour before their special for the day (library) Ms. Wallace read a book out loud to the class while some knitted and others just sat on the floor and listened to the story. For history, since today is Cinco de Mayo, the students learned about this holiday for the Mexican-Americans, and why it is a holiday, after we learned the Mexican hat dance. This first day was a lot of fun, and I am very excited for these next three weeks!

Written at 6:30