Week 2: Conflict Resolution

In this lesson, the class had a discussion about the importance of conflict resolution. Everyday, people are faced with challenges and sometimes disagreements. Today's lesson focuses on how to resolve our conflicts. The students learn different ways to resolve disagreements. As an activity, I had the students work in cooperative groups. I wanted to see how the students reacted to working in a group setting as I was still learning the personalities of the class. Although this was quite a chaotic way to see personalities, it helped me identify which students not to group together for certain tasks. I kept note of that.
For the activity, students came up with a conflict/disagreement scenario. The groups were also required to solve their own problems, identify the solution, and role play the whole scene. The outcome of the activity was fair. Some students had difficulty because they were embarrassed to present, but the majority of the students enjoyed role playing. It was fun watching the kids in action.

Week 2: Introduction, minerals, and rocks

In this first week of actual teaching, I begin with teaching minerals and rocks for science, and U.S. government/civics for social studies. I am realizing the difficulties that teachers are facing everyday in terms of having enough time to teach each subject. One 40 minute block is really not enough to have good instruction for neither science nor social studies. I ask Mr. Johnson about this problem and he says to me with a grin, "welcome to the real world of teaching." We come up with a plan to alternate days for teaching each subject as my master teacher notices that I have difficulty squeezing two subjects in 80 minutes.
The students are excited at this point that there are new teaching strategies being applied in their class. My classroom management skills are being put to the test as my students' excitement gets the best of them.
Mr. Johnson showed me how he uses some technology in teaching his lessons by showing video clips on brainpop. Brainpop is a website that provides cartoon clips of different topics, and Garapan Elementary School is a member of this site. As an introduction to the lesson on minerals and rocks, we watch a brainpop video. I will use this video clip as reference as we learn about minerals and rocks. In addition, I introduce the use of graphic organizers to the class to help us log our learning.

week 1

During this first week in Mr. Johnson's class, I spend most of my time observing student behavior and teaching strategies of the master teacher. I learn in this week that I will be teaching Social Studies and Science. I feel pretty anxious and nervous when Mr. Johnson mentions this to me, but I accept the challenge and start doing my research. At this point, Mr. Johnson asks me how familiar I am with using teacher's editions. I honestly reply that I don't really have much experience with working with teacher's edition textbooks. He suggests that I take this time to learn how to use it while integrating the strategies that I've learned at the School of Education. As i look through the teacher's edition, I realize how much I don't know about it. I'm learning that there are many component to this book, and I can see how some teachers can be dependent and limit themselves to this resource. This is not easy at all. Here we go!

At first....

When I was first told that I would be working with Mr. Johnson's class at Garapan Elementary School I was excited and nervous at the same time. Although this was my second time working with Mr. Johnson, this would be a whole other experience as the challenges became much harder. The expectations are higher this time, but I was confident that I would get the hang of it as I progressed. During this first week in Mr. Johnson's class, I spent most of time observing Mr. Johnson's teaching styles, and the different student personalities in the classroom.