What Are You Thankful For?

Since it is Thanksgiving break I'm going to take the time to just do a random post of different things I've wanted to talk about but just didn't fit into my story.

For any of my friends that are student teaching next semester let me start off by telling you the power of a hug. I have a student in my class that drives me up the wall.  He never, ever feels like doing work and my University Supervisor always says, "Kirsten, why did you just let him do what he wants?"  I have tried everything I could think of to get him to work.  He wants computer time so I bribed him with it.  If he did all of his work then I'd let him have free time on the computer.  That didn't work.  No matter what bribe I'd give him he'd NEVER do his work.  Every random Monday he would actually give no problem at all.  We assumed it is the day he's getting his medication and we would give him ultimate rewards for doing such a great job.  This literally happened MAYBE once a month.  Last week I realized how much time I spend scolding him and showing my frustration and I felt awful.  Who knows what he's hearing at home, too.  As the other students were eating breakfast I called him over to me and gave him a big hug.  He looked at me with a huge smile on his face and said, "Now Ms. Kirsten, what was that for?" and I just said, "You looked like you needed a hug and I did too."  I had absolutely NO problems with him all day.  Maybe it wasn't my hug that did it, but his smile that morning makes me think it was.  I'm going to test my theory again Monday.

So, I have this kid in my class.  He is too stinkin' cute.  There's a little girl in one of the other 2nd grade classes that finds me every. single. day to say, "Hey will you tell him I said hi!"  The first time she ever did that I asked him if it was his girlfriend.  His response? "Ms. Kirsten, she was my girlfriend last year but she always asked for my snack at recess and I got tired of it so I broke up with her."  How adorable is that response? I said, "Geez, girls are just too demanding, huh?" to which I heard, "Yeah, tell me about it.  All they do is say 'give me this' and 'give me that'."  Same child also told me he climbed Mt. Everest over the summer and that it is located in New York City.

As the semester comes to a close next Friday I am preparing little goodie bags for them.  I am so sad that I have to leave them, but so ready to graduate!

They will each get a handful of Hershey Hugs so they can feel extra love from me after I leave and some Smarties since they are such smarties.  My students love seeing pictures of themselves and are constantly trying to take pictures with me so I made each one a keychain with a picture of the two of us in it.  I often felt so stressed and they had times where they didn't love me AS much so since they are sometimes sweetTARTS they get sweetTART candy canes.  I also found a lot of stuff with the idea that they are #1 so I got a bookmark, pencil, and sucker all saying that.  I got a lot of the stuff from Oriental Trading. 

So to my friends going through student teaching next semester, I hope you ladies have as much fun as I did and just know that a simple hug is something that will make the students feel spoiled and loved.

Oh My, Pumpkin Pie!

I am down to my last few days with my fabulous 2nd graders and only one subject to teach in a day.  I am left with teaching writing.

This week was different for writing than it has been the past few weeks.  They write awesome paragraphs when they have to write on something they have experienced so I decided they would start celebrating Thanksgiving kind of early.  I found a super easy pumpkin pie recipe that doesn't require any actual cooking.

Monday we read the story There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie and we just talked about the different types of desserts we eat during the holidays.

Tuesday was pie-making day!  I showed them all of the ingredients and explained what they were to do and they got to make it.






Here's how we made it:

Individual pie crusts
3 spoonfuls of vanilla pudding
1 spoonful of pumpkin mix



Just stir the pudding and pumpkin in a bowl and then pour into the pie crust. 

After they ate the pie I let each student come up and write their name on a t-chart to show whether they liked the pie or not.

Wednesday was spent making a circle map to come up with some describing words and coming with some sentence examples.  Since we're talking about pumpkin pie and I'm trying to make this process as exciting as possible I let them make the circle map on a paper plate which they decorated like a pumpkin.

Thursday we finally got to the four square.  I held off on the four square because I scheduled my last observation with my university supervisor for that day and I have spent so much time bragging about the four square that I really wanted her to see them create it.  We did one as a class and then they had to do one on their own.

On Friday they transferred the four square into a paragraph.  I found a pumpkin writing template and we added the pictures taken on Tuesday to the writing paper.

It was definitely the most successful writing experience I've had so far!  They had such a great time with the whole project.  For my last week I'm hoping they'll love it just as much because we will be reading The Cajun Gingerbread Boy and they'll get to decorate a cookie and I found foam ones so they can keep one too.  Hopefully after this they'll enjoy writing... 

The Adventures of...

...the Louisiana Philharmonic Ochestra
I patiently awaited the day I'd get to take a field trip with my awesome 2nd graders all semester.  I found the school calendar immediately wrote down the two weeks that the 2nd grade classes could go on a field trip.  Just my luck, the first field trip was scheduled during our mandatory mid-semester seminar.  It was to an alligator farm that I took the 9 year old I babysit to over the summer, so I knew what I was missing out on, but it is a completely different experience as a field trip. 

Well, the next field trip was scheduled for today!  It was a trip to see the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.  I was definitely not looking forward to this one.  I have attended so many musicals, plays, and orchestras and been near a group of children who do not know how to act in a theater and it is very frustrating.  Plus, I just really did not forsee these kids enjoying an orchestra. 

Much to my surprise, though, this was specifically planned for kids!  We all left thinking it should have lasted a little longer!  The conductor came out on stage to greet the audience and a "UPS" man had to deliver a package of "Melody".  The whole performance was so kid friendly and set up to inform the students of the terms used in music--harmony, melody, rythym, timbre, and more.  They played Ode to Joy and provided the audience with lyrics so we could sing it as they played.  At the end of the performance they let the audience pick how the finale would be performed. 

My 2nd graders thorougly enjoyed the field trip.   I was so surprised!!  One student in front of me pretended to be the conductor the entire time and a few seats down another pretended to play the violin.  I was so proud of their awesome behavior (for once).  They were better examples of how to act during a performance than the high schoolers that were there. 

What a great experience for my students.  I'm so happy they actually fully appreciated the trip!

Show Me the Money!

This past week in Math we have been learning about money.  Who doesn't love money, right?  Let's just say after this week, this girl does not enjoy money.  Luckily, I was warned by the other 2nd grade teachers that money is pretty hard, so I dug around my house and got all the coins I could find.

As I mentioned, my students love when I read books to them and it was just my luck that I have The Coin Counting Book that I bought last year for a tutoring project.  I actually started everyday the same because I knew they needed all the help and repetition they could get.  My students loved hearing it so much that they are constantly asking to read it on their own.

We use Harcourt materials for math and it was an absolutely fabulous resource for an awesome game that requires the students to count change up to 50 cents.  Separate the coins from pennies to one half dollar coin in each of the sections.  The students are to roll a die and the student is to place however many pennies into the empty section.  That is "trading center".  We get Math intervention times and I have found that this game works much better during that 30 minute time slot.  I tried it whole group and small groups, but intervention time proved best.

 

(I think it's important for the students to use real money)

The hardest part for the students was adding the money in the trading center.  How did I solve this?

Through the use of a hundreds chart, ten frame, and dry erase markers.  For the ten frame I put (5 cents) at the end of the top row and (10 cents) at the end of the second row.  During our game we'd place the pennies on the ten frame to see what trades we could make and we would mark the amount rolled each time, that way when we would figure out the trades I could ask, "Do we still have (whatever the amount) cents?"  I don't know about the other groups, but my group really soared with this resource.  

Five days later, I can promise you I am so over money... but don't worry, my students are excited about it enough to beg for the money game and counting book every chance they get!  Even though I wanted to pull my hair out after today's test, I really am one happy teacher that they are actually excited about learning.

And Then There Was BOO!

Halloween is not my favorite holiday because I hate scary movies and haunted houses.  I'm not scared of them (I don't like feeling jumpy), but when it comes to celebrating holidays in a classroom I'm pretty sure nothing is more fun than a Halloween party!  Well, I forget that I grew up at a Catholic school where it's okay to talk about Halloween and other holidays, but in a public school you sometimes can't even call it a party.  They've settled this by making it Storybook Character Day and the kids can still dress up in a costume as long as it is a storybook character.  My students anticipated our celebration all week long, as did I.

We decided to bring a little Halloween themed things into the mix, but we really did have a child in the class that is not allowed to celebrate Halloween.  We had a recipe for making spider cookies and I was so psyched about it!  It was something the students could do that wasn't all about school work, but since it was Storybook Character Day instead of Halloween I had to come up with a book.  Thank you, Eric Carle, for your amazing book selections!  The best book to tie into making spider cookies was The Very Busy Spider.  The cookies are super easy and quite tasty.

Here's what you need:
Oreos
chocolate Twizzlers/black licorice
marshmallow cream

Untwist the Oreo
Break the Twizzler into 8 small pieces
Put marshmallow cream on one part of the cookie
Put the Twizzlers on like legs
Replace the top of the cookie

The students acted like they had never eaten Oreos before. It was great and I had enough left overs to make another spider.  Here's the finished product (unfortunately I had to scale it down to crop out my student):

And don't worry, there were Superheroes to save the day ;)

P.S. I was Iron Ma'am :)

All We Need is Love

As mentioned in the last two posts, today is National Day on Writing.  I don't want to bore you, but I suppose if you're reading this it's because you're actually interested in what I have to say.  The past week has actually been a fantastic week for me to write anyway.

This week we have had nothing but fun activities!  I always have fun activities but they are usually spread out throughout the week.  This week started with an exciting Social Studies lesson on crops and natural resources.  How did we do that?  Last semester my teacher, who is now my university supervisor, taught us the power of a virtual tour.  It's so simple- pictures of a place and just acting out a field trip.  We went to my mom's vegetable garden!  They love doing that, but then following it up with them planting a few green bean seeds definitely helped with the excitement!  We placed the cups in the window and have been anticipating the growth all week.  We also did a lesson on bar graphs and we did that through graphing M & M's.

Math was so simple to make exciting this week.  Patterns.  Even the most simple things can excite them.  I passed out construction paper and had them create all the different patterns they wanted, then as a class we created one giant classroom pattern from the paper colors!  Today they got to make pattern necklaces.

The most rewarding part for me, though, was the writing prompt.  They were learning to write letters this week.  The true objective was to be able to write a letter to the me of some things they wanted me to change in the class.  Instead, I got a bunch of letters saying how much they were going to miss me. One said, "Miss Kirsten, I'm sorry I'll be leaving you for 3rd grade.  You will always be in my heart and you will still be my BFF" (just add a few misspellings). It was so sweet and so heartbreaking.  I just keep thinking, "Come on, December 2nd", but then I think about leaving the sweet faces and I just get upset.   What am I going to do when I'm officially a teacher?

It's been a rough half of a semester, but every part of the roller coaster has made me fall more in love with my students.

We're All in This Together...?

It's only Tuesday and I feel the need to blog again.  I was planning on writing on Thursday since it is the National Day of Writing, so this week you may be thinking I'm crazy for constant blogging, but I don't mind.

After this semester I realize just how sheltered I've been my whole life.  I grew up going to a VERY small Catholic school from Kindergarten until 8th grade.  Once I graduated 8th grade I went to a fairly small Catholic high school.  Growing up I remember wishing every school year that we'd get a new student in our class, but it never really happened.  By the time I made it to high school it was fantastic seeing new faces, but even still there weren't really any "new" students after freshman year.  At least until Katrina hit, and then it basically became a whole new school.  That year was pretty nice because I was able to meet a ton of new people and I didn't completely hate school anymore.

I realize that concept is completely unrealistic.  As I mentioned in my first post, I started the school year off with 20 students.  My second week of teaching we got a new student who transferred from another school. That seemed pretty normal, it was only two weeks into school.  It has been a roller coaster ride ever since!  I feel like every week we lose students left and right.  In one week I went from 21 students down to 18.  Yesterday we lost two more students.  Just when I thought it was all over, the secretary calls over the intercom today asking for a student to escort our new student to the classroom.  Here I was thinking, "Oh, how nice this classroom is with only 16 students."  I just can't get over the fact that we are 10 weeks into school and still losing and gaining students.  When will it ever stop?

Well, guys, as far as I can tell it never will.  During my methods set in February there were still students being taken from one class to be put into another.  Can't we ever just catch a break?  Not that it really matters... I have 17 absolutely nerve-racking, fabulously awesome students and I love each and every one of them (until I get a new student and then I'll just change the number!)

All Write, 2nd Grade!

I found out National Day on Writing is October 20, so in honor of that I'll introduce you to Four Square writing method.  I feel it's GENIUS for teaching younger children the concept of a paragraph.  The administrators at school are huge fans, and are really pushing the writing method. 

Four square writing method simplifies the construction of a paragraph.  It can be used for older students who are learning to write four or five paragraph papers.  The book, written by Judith S. Gould, Evan Jay Gould, and Mary F. Burke, comes with an instruction disk and great ways to introduce the method of writing to students. The provided four square paper is literally four large squares with a rectangle in the middle.  The rectangle is the main idea/topic sentence, three of the squares are the detail sentences, and the final box is the closing sentence.  Who could ask for a more simple explanation of constructing a paragraph?

My second graders have gotten used to the writing method so we've started using it more thoroughly.  During the week they do the entire process of writing.  We start with the circle map to develop ideas about the given topic, then move onto the four square. The students should transfer the sentences for the first draft.  Since that shouldn't take any time at all I usually end up editing each paragraph the same day.

This past week they had to write about their favorite sport.  I have 13 boys in my class, so I thought this topic would be a hit.  I was wrong.  I have no choice for the weekly topic, so they wrote anyway.  I'm trying to come up with some creative ways to accomplish the four square since they are beginning to say, "Oh no, not writing", so any recommendations are accepted.  Here's an example of the four square with the first draft:

Don't forget, October 20th is National Writing Day!

Journey Through Student Teaching...

After nearly 9 weeks of my student teaching experience I've decided I have enough fun(ny) things to share. I'll give a quick overview of my journey thus far.

I was supposed to be in a Pre-K classroom in a completely different school, but three days before school started I was moved to Midway Elementary in a 2nd grade classroom.  As upset and terrified as I was in the beginning, these 22 second graders have stolen my heart!  I actually only have 18 students in my classroom (six of which are girls) and they are wild, goofy, and too sweet!  Everyday there's a new silly story to tell.

The entire parish has low scores as far as the school report cards go, but Midway (D+) has received the SIG grant to attempt higher scores.  Talk about tough!  The grant has a ton of stipulations that are hard to keep up with, but the way I look at it, if I can make it through this semester as a student teacher I can do anything!  The grant requires meetings everyday, more interventions for Math and Reading (but we actually get interventionists for those), data boards, and much more.

Now that there is somewhat of a background of my classroom I can begin sharing the stories (like the lock down we had) and the fun lessons we've had!