Week Two Wonderings

     This week in our pre-internship class my co-teaching partner and I led a small group of fourth grade boys as they read aloud chapter three of their social studies textbook.  Our class is a fourth and fifth grade combo class; therefore, our teacher asked us to work with the fourth graders in order for her to teach the fifth graders a lesson without distracting the fourth graders.  This made me wonder several things.  Mainly, how effective are combo classrooms in which one teacher is in charge of two separate grade levels? Why do schools use this teaching approach? 
     My co-teaching partner and I instructed the fourth graders in a work area connected to the classrooms.  In the beginning of the reading, the boys were a bit goofy.  They were laughing while their peers were reading as well as interjecting.  I think this was because they were not used to us teaching them.  Maybe they were testing us? It did not take them long to settle down though.  Overall, they are a great group of kids.  The only other issue that we had was completing the review at the end of the chapter.  The students were very loud/ rowdy for the space we were in, and I was concerned that it was disturbing the students in other classrooms.  I learned from this small experience that I need to work on my class management skills without being too harsh on the students.  There is no problem with the students talking and working together in my opinion as long as the work is being done.  This made me wonder how you establish yourself as a warm demander with your students? What is the appropriate level of off-topic conversation/ “roudiness” before you say something to your students? How do you tell your students to behave in a way that gets your message across while also maintaining the students level of respect for you?

     In addition to leading this small group, we also co-taught our second lesson.  Instead of a reading lesson however, it was a fifth grade math lesson.  The lesson was on explaining the relationship of the x and y axis on line graphs.  The line graphs were titled and labeled, but there were no scales (numbers).  The students had to explain what was happening in the graphs based on what they saw.  Overall the lesson went well.  It was another successful week in the classroom.  

Teaching our First Lesson

     At the beginning of the week, my co-teaching partner and I were asked to teach our first lesson.  It was a reading lesson.  We read the story, Zathura: A Space Adventure by Chris Van Allsburg with the fifth grade students in our four/five combo class.  Prior to reading the story, we reviewed several vocabulary words that the students had previous exposure to and that would be found again in the story we were reading.  After reviewing the vocabulary and going over some reading strategies, we pulled popscicle sticks with the students’ names written on them from a basket to determine the order that the students would read aloud.  After each student had the opportunity to read atleast half a page of text in the story, my co-teaching partner and I read the rest of the story aloud to the students.  We used different voices for different characters, such as a robot. We also used intonation in our voices and gestures and sounds that helped the story come alive a bit more for the students.    

     Throughout the reading we stopped to ask the students comprehension questions about the story as well as fill out a workbook page about using evidence from the story to form conclusions.  We had a handful of the same students raising their hands to answer the questions and mostly called on them.  Our mentor teacher suggested that we also call on students that were not raising their hands in order to gauge their understanding and get them involved in the lesson.  This was difficult to achieve at times.  When I called on students to see if they had anything to add to the discussion, they oftentimes did not have anything to say and I did not know how to get them to answer.  I was worried about putting them on the spot or making them uncomfortable.  I did not want to make them hate reading because I called them out in front of their peers.  This made me think of Passion One from our reading in The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research by Dana and Yendol-Hoppey.  How do you help an individual child participate in a lesson? The students lack of interaction also made me wonder why they were not participating.  Did they not understand the questions? Did they depend on or assume one of the students that frequently raised their hand would answer again? Did they not like the story? How could we get them to participate?
     My co-teacher and I asked several questions throughout the story.  Maybe too many.  They were all great questions in my opinion, but it made us go over our allotted time.  We were not able to start the last workbook page with the students that we were supposed to do with them during the reading block.  This made me think of Passion Four from the reading: Improve or Experiment with Teaching Strategies or Techniques.  Moreover, it made me wonder which questions would be most important to ask the students?    
     Overall, our first lesson went well. I hope to more effectively utilize questions as well as find ways to engage all students in future lessons.