So this was my first week of field and I am actually very excited for the next few weeks/months. I am in a first grade room at Melrose with Mr. Larousse. I had been in a first grade classroom at Kean, but this is a huge difference. Mr. Larousse is VERY energetic about teaching, and so the students seem to pick up on that and be very energetic (but in a good way) too. The classroom is bigger than any I’ve been in, although when I mentioned this he said that the room is smaller than what he is used to. There are 23 students in the class.
What excites/scares me the most is that Mr. Larousse want Ashley and I (we are co-teaching) to jump right in immediately. He was going to have us teach our first lessons the very first week there, but it didn’t work out. It’s really great to have someone who is so supportive of my jumping in to help though. On Monday the class started with some oral math problems which the students had to write answers to on their white boards. This was good for me because it gave me the opportunity to walk around and help students and get to know them without distracting anyone from Mr. Larousse. On Wednesday we worked on addition facts and playing a game with addition facts. Mr. Larousse had to be partners with one of the students because there is an odd number, so I got to be “in charge” for awhile. It went well, with the only major issues being students worrying about their partners cheating, etc. We worked on a timeline of major holidays, and it was funny to see what the students considered to be holidays (“My tooth fell out” or “My mom’s birthday”). On Thursday we went over math fact triangles and played the addition facts game again. After the students left for gym I got to write in some of their journals. Mr. Larousse writes in their journals every night, responding to what they wrote, and then they write back the next day. Well, I got to respond to them, which was funny to see what the students thought was important to write about.
They all seem very enthusiastic to have me there, so I really am looking forward to seeing how the rest of the semester goes. I teach my first lesson next week, so we’ll see…
