Kassie Vaughn

Journal Entries

Week of March 24th-28th

March 24, 2014

One crucial thing I have learned throughout my Student Teaching experience is how to monitor and adjust. For example, we were scheduled for MAP Testing at 8:15 this morning. However, there were numerous issues we had to address first: First Grade were taking their tests at the same time, the wrong test was started, and our students had to be split and taken to three different areas for testing. Once my class finally started at 8:45 a.m., valuable class time had already been wasted. On average, it took the kids 45 minutes to an hour to complete their tests. As a result, I had to skip instruction on Handwriting and cram in Spelling and Grammar. Even though there were problems, the MAP Tests are vital in determining where individual children are pertaining to their intelligence levels, and made me monitor and adjust my plans for the day.

March 26, 2014

This week I have given Mrs. Hall back the subjects of Math, Science, and Social Studies, so therefore I am now teaching half-day. In Handwriting, we are recognizing, writing, and reviewing the upper-case cursive letters D and C. As review of the letter D, I let the students experiment with shaving cream, by spraying it on their desks and having them practice writing it in the cream with their finger. They love this activity (we have done it several times), but it takes a little bit of patience and time to clean up. In Spelling, I am teaching the kid about suffixes y, -ly, and ful, and in Grammar, they have been learning about irregular verbs (have, has, had, do, did, does). Our tested story for this week is The Goat in the Rug and the children are working on the strategy of drawing conclusions in Guided Reading groups.

March 27, 2014

I had a bittersweet feeling about today, because it was my last day of actually teaching my children subjects. I still have tomorrow, which is Friday, but they will mostly be taking tests (except for the Musical Letters game I have planned for them to play). In Handwriting today, they learned the upper-case cursive letter C. Mrs. Hall also conducted her last observation of me while I was teaching my Grammar lesson. The lesson was on reviewing different forms of the verb BE (is, are, am, was, and were). I wrote five different sentence frames on the board and each table group was given a sheet of construction paper with one of the verb forms on it. Working together, the groups had to decide which sentence their specific verb fit in correctly.