I should really update more often, but I've just been so busy! Last Thursday I met the late afternoon 4th grade class and read my All About Me book to them. That class is a lot smaller than the homeroom morning class, and A LOT rowdier, but my partner and I are up for the challenge. We also got the chance to grade some homework and use our cooperating teacher's grade book last Thursday.

Today started our second week in the schools and I can confidently say I am still in love with the 4th grade. I am getting to know the late afternoon class better, which is helpful since I will be seeing them a lot! All weekend my partner and I have been working on our lesson (for tomorrow). Our cooperating teacher is awesome and gave us so many materials to work with, including the student's Social Studies book and her lesson plans from last year in the unit they are currently learning. We choose to do a lesson on the Lenni Lenape Indians and will go over text book vocab, have group work answering questions on a worksheet, class discussions and a fun traditional Lenni Lenape game! I hope it goes smoothly, we only have 35 minutes, and a lot to cover! We will be observed by our Internship professor, so it's a little stressful, but it's our first official lesson- so hopefully he'll be easy on us.

[For privacy purposes, I will use 'S' as my partner and Mrs. F as my cooperating teacher; just in case they don't want their names posted all over my blog.]

Mrs. F. gave me and S another project to due this week- a bulletin board! The students have been working on their sentence and paragraph structure and have read the book "Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree" . Our bulletin board will be displayed right outside of the classroom- and we have already put up a huge tree made out of paper. Tomorrow, we will fill in the leaves and branches with the student's work, and handmade leaves with their names on it! We are so thrilled to be able to contribute so much to the class in only our 2nd week. Pictures will follow! We have to collect pictures of most everything we do for our portfolio at the end of the semester. How annoying... but it will help us in the long run. Today in class we had the chance to talk to each student about the NJASK scores (a state-wide test the students took at the beginning of the year). It was sad to see that only a handful of students got passing grades, but I hope to see with my own eyes their improvement in the next few months.

Hopefully I'll get to update soon about how our first lesson went :)