Quiet day

I wasn’t quite sure which lessons I’m doing in the morning today, so I over planned a little bit. It was lucky because my CT did think I was doing all of the mini lessons. I also came in early to work on guided reading and grab a few more books for that. That was helpful today when I pulled two guided reading groups. I did a lesson on cause and effect using the Smartboard, one on summarizing a story using the book we read on Monday, and one on Fact vs. Opinion. They all went well and the class was pretty good for me today. My CT needed to leave the room and go on a conference call so I had another teacher in the room with me for a bit and they were great. I don’t really understand it, but they seem to behave better for me when my CT is not in the room. This is frustrating because I feel like she sees more of the bad than the good. But, I got my evaluation from her today too and it was really glowing, so that was really nice to read. She also wrote me a letter of recommendation that is fantastic. I’m really relieved about all of that. She is going to email it to me so that I have it.
It was nice to observe most of the afternoon today too. I got to see how my CT does Problem Solving, which is a math program we do on Wednesdays. I started it, so I hadn’t seen her do a lesson with it yet. She did it the same way I did, but added a few helpful hints. She also reviewed homework with them, which was something I hadn’t done. They have all been doing well on their homework anyway, but it probably was a good idea to expose them to it first. The problem is just like the two examples done in class.

My favorite part of the day was writing young authors books. The class started publishing their first few pages into their real books from their dummy books. They are looking really great. I like the way they are working on them. Now they will start doing 3 pages at a time in the dummy book, then publishing three pages, going back and forth until they are finished.

At the end of the day, we were coming back from music. Music is outside in the trailers so we always have trouble coming into the building without running. I told them that if they could walk all the way back to the classroom without running, we’d play a game. Luckily, that worked and we resumed out game of 7-up that we didn’t get to finish yesterday.