Another Monday

This morning was interesting because I taught all morning, except for one mini lesson. I also pulled two new guided reading groups. I met with red and orange groups today, and tomorrow I will meet with yellow and green. Blue is the only group I haven’t taken over yet. I also did a mini lesson on comprehension and a mini lesson on the –y chunk of the week. –y is a difficult chunk to me because it’s not exactly a chunk of letters. The idea was for students to get words like “cry” and “sky” and “fly” but they also thought of words that end in y like “Sunday” and “dirty.” I clarified with my CT beforehand that she wanted just words that end in y and sound like “eye” at the end, but it was hard to explain without them coming up with other sounds. For my comprehension lesson, the Smartboard went crazy on me and adobe was “auto scrolling” through my whole document. The kids were in awe of this and I had to get it to stop. By the time I got it to stop, it was at the end of my document, so I needed to scroll back to up to the beginning to get to the page we are on. The class was kind of chatty while they were waiting but I thanked those students who were doing the right thing and the rest of them fell into line soon after. In guided reading, I introduced new books to each group. I introduced the book first and then went through some vocabulary. I think I will keep these same books for the next time I meet with the groups and do a little retelling and journaling activity with each of them.

This afternoon, I taught math as usual. I tried to differentiate the activities a little more by having a more difficult worksheet for those who finished early. This was good but hard to keep track of. I had a Smartboard activity running in the background for those who finished the first 2 worksheets. I’m trying to get away from doing this, but it works so well that it’s hard. Tomorrow I may have them use my CT’s fact triangle sheets games or something else new.

I sent one girl to the nurse this afternoon because she told me repeatedly that she felt like she was going to throw up. At first I thought she’s forget it but she kept complaining and she usually doesn’t complain about stuff like that so I sent her. When she came back she seemed fine and my CT seemed disappointed that she had gone to the nurse. I felt like I had done something wrong, but I was worried about her and I thought I’d rather be safe than sorry in that situation.

When the kids came in from recess, I got them in line to go to gym. We walked down to the gym in the hall pretty well, with no excessive noise or anything. My CT noticed that they haven’t been packing up as well and that they are leaving things in their chair bags and on their tables, so they need to do a better job packing up. It is something I will try to watch out for over the next few weeks.