Internship (Week 10)

The first week of teaching 4th grade was a mixture of success and failure. I enjoyed it more than I ever imagined I would! The bad part is, majority of the kids failed the grammar test Friday :(

I was teaching by my teacher's lesson plan book. This past week, she was going to do prepositions and phrases. I remember learning prepositions and prepositional phrases when I was in 3rd grade. We had what the called the "Shirley Method" and all of the parts of speech came with a jingle. I enjoyed learning that way because it was easy to remember. They don't teach with that method anymore. So I did the best I could with it. They didn't get it :(

Out of 55 fourth graders, I think 7 understood it and passed. Therefore, this week I will be reteaching. Spring break is coming up, and we have a field trip on Friday, so I hated to start another weekly story with spelling and vocabulary words to learn when we wasn't going to be able to test on them Friday. Since the kids didn't grasp prepositions, she let me decide to reteach, go further in depth with it, and spend more time on prepositions. I also plan to have a writing prompt with them. I will be reading Bently & egg which is really cute!! The kids will write about what they would do if they were taking care of an egg. I found an egg shape, but I can't figure out how to print the lines on it for them to write :(

I'm hoping this week I can teach them prepositions better. I understand it's super complicated to grasp. So I'm hoping we can go at it slowly, and learn it!!

I wanted to share a game that I saw in a 6th grade field experience classroom. She played Jeopardy with her students using ELA categories. I loved it, and decided to play it Thursday with my kids as a review game. My categories were Spelling, Grammar, Vocabulary, and Moonwalk, which was our weekly story. Each category had 5 questions. Each question was worth 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 points. The kids worked as teams, and I like this idea because it practices teamwork! In spelling, I had words that were going to be on their spelling test. Grammar was finding the preposition or phrase in a sentence. Vocabulary was telling the definition of a word, and they had to tell the word. Moonwalk was questions about the story that I found on the test. They absolutely LOVED it!! One of my groups played it 3 times!!! I loved the idea, and now love it even more knowing they liked it so much. It was really fun, and they were preparing for there test at the same time :)  
Always a plus!!

Internship is flying by! I can't believe I'm almost finished!!