Em Taught All Day Today!!!

Hey Everybody!!!

Today was such a wonderful day, I had the chance to teach all day!!!  My CT was sick, so I stepped up and decided to try teaching for the entire day!  Chrissy talked me though what she had planned and where everything was so I felt prepared to go in.  I was really excited about this; I've been waiting to teach a full day ever since my first day student teaching.  Chrissy and the 27 students have done a wonderful job making me feel at home at Holy Family...now I had the chance to put it all together and see how well I am able to teach.   The kids were very excited for me... when I greeted them in the morning, many of them said "are you going to teach the entire day...SWEET!"  I got a few good lucks and a hugs from them too. 

The staff was also very helpful.  The sub that was there said she'd be willing to do whatever I needed.  She offered to correct papers...I had her help me do one of the guided reading groups so we could get through all three groups.  She also helped with the peanut butter and jelly groups.   The 4th and 5th grade teachers came in the room in the morning and wished me good luck and said if I needed them to feel free to ask for help.  During lunch everybody asked me how it was going and were very encouraging as well.  At the end of the day, the 5th grade teacher came up to me and said congrats for completing my first day of FT student teaching!

Today was my first teaching math, writing and social studies.  I stuck to the email that Chrissy sent me...I wanted to follow her lessons exactly as she intended.  I did pretty well (save my pacing).  The only slight deviation was having the students practice standing in a certain hemispheres instead of simply explaining it via the whiteboard.  We then read the book and practiced identifying which countries were on which hemispheres.  Everybody understood. 

Religion dominated.   The kids sang "The Apostle's Creed" again.  At first some were worried, but after we went through it once, they wanted to all sing it over and over again!  We're going to keep on singing the song until we have that prayer memorized.  Every day, I'm removing part of the words from the board until they are able to sing the entire song from memory.  Some all ready are.  You can hear them humming it . 

Tomorrow Chrissy will be back, so I'm going to make sure these next few days I pay close attention to how she paces herself, and the flow of math and social studies.  Pretty soon I'll be full time teaching the entire day all week...starting next week!  I want to make sure I soak in these next few days to learn as much as possible!  Even though I've learned so much, there is so much more to learn!

I'm very lucky to have such a wonderful and supporting community at HFS! I'm heading in the direction that I want to be heading in... and I'm loving it!

Now back to grading these reading books... and planning next weeks lessons!!!!

Em