September Student Teaching

I've already been Student Teaching for six weeks now! Time is flying by. I had a reality check yesterday with how close I am to graduating. My Mom called me to ask me about graduation announcements after I had sat down my cooperating teacher and outlined my plans for the next two months. A little stressed and a little overwhelmed. BUT!

I'm still very happy and I have learned so much. It's amazing how many ideas and resources I feel like I have already came across. Pinterest has been my best friend while planning my lessons. I don't know what I'd do without it!

I've been teaching a lot of Grammar Skills with the third graders. I started by teaching them to identify sentences as a statement, a question, a command, or an exclamation. For this activity, the students made an inner circle and outer circle. The inner circle students had different example sentences and the outer circle had their whiteboard and dry erase marker. The students worked with partners to identify the different sentences as fast as they could.

I also taught the students to identify and create a sentence with a simple subject and simple predicate. I found an idea on Pinterest to make a Grammar Flipbook/Foldable. I shared the idea with my cooperating teacher and now all three of the third grade classes are going to try it. One thing that is amazing at the school is the teachers collaborate together on everything! They work really well together. I can only hope to get into a situation like that my first few years! Hopefully the foldables help the kids learn and understand the skill! 

I made all of the teachers an example one.

Sorted the labels and definitions.

The students wrote their own sentence, underlined the subject and circled the predicate. I remember practicing this is third grade!

They also placed an X under the simple subject and simple predicate. We had them write their answer on a whiteboard before copying it to the grammar flipbook. We use our whiteboards for everything! So useful.

I'm in the midst of planning my unit which will cover solving subtraction problems with four digit numbers with and without regrouping. I feel like I'll be learning with the kids, what I have to do a lot of the time! They learn Math a completely different way than I had learned it growing up. It would have been so much more beneficial for students to learn the conceptual way. I'm collaborating with another Student Teacher for my unit which is perfect, we already have some great ideas.

Halloween is right around the corner and we started decorating! I'm teaching two Art lessons this week and today we made witches and spiders to hang up in our room. They added a lot to the room, too cute! The kids loved it too.

Some of our spiders.

Our witches.

Definitely going to do this when I get my own classroom.

We hung them up all through the classroom. It was quite the process but two hours later, they were all up! All three of the third grade classrooms have them up successfully :)

September has been a great month. I can't wait for October with my kiddos.