Sometime between when I went to bed last night, and when I woke up, I decided to give myself a break. I had an epiphany: over the last three weekends, I was sick for two of them - once with a head cold, and once with a 48 hour stomach flu (over the holiday weekend, of course!). I am being too hard on myself - I'm producing high quality work and an unsustainable pace. Time to cut myself some slack!
I checked in homework and lead Morning Meeting today. We greeted each other by singing the phrase, "One, two, three, four, come on (insert name) hit the floor!" The student enters the circle and shows off some dance moves. The chant continues as he/she dances, "We're so glad you're here today - hooray, hooray, hooray!" There's even a little "raising the roof" action in the latter part of the cheer. Amy gave me a compliment that I was "right on" keeping the students in check and focused during homework check-in/EMA. YES!
I taught grammar - possessive pronouns - this afternoon after watching Ms. Conrad teach it once. Her PowerPoints are very thorough and make it easy to jump into teaching the lesson without much prep. I think it went well - and I was able to get the students to transition on time!
Directly after, I taught the science lesson on magnets. It was a really fun lesson! I redesigned Amy's documents over the weekend to be more user-friendly and to be better organized/esthetically pleasing. Amy observed my lesson and had some great feedback. She said that I am coming into my own as a teach, and that it's exciting to see. Apparently, I have a natural presence in front of the class!
In the lesson, I discussed how magnets have two poles - north and south. When you put opposite poles together, they attract one another. If you put like poles together, they repel each other! The best part of the lesson was when I had a student stick strong doughnut-shaped magnets onto a dowel with like poles facing each other. The magnets HOVER! It's the coolest thing! You can literally see the force fields working against one another!
After school (half day), I sat in a few parent-teacher conferences. They were interesting to observe. I did find myself wanting to contribute and jump in - wanting to let the parents know how fantastic their children are! It was a good experience to go through - especially watching Amy prepare for the meetings. She looked through all of the assessment scores from fourth grade, wrote comments about their social behaviors, and collected information from the other teachers about how each student performs in their classes. Lots and lots of prep work!
I went home and frantically prepared my math lesson for tomorrow. Those lesson plans are torture, BUT they do prep you for every step of the lesson. After I finally finished the plan, I had to move on to correct response logs, create strategic pairings for the math lesson, add pieces of evidence to my PPA+ binder, and think of goals for my mid-term evaluation tomorrow. It was a long night...with a few tears, but I finished it all up and was in be by 10:30 pm.
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