WEEK 3

WHAT

This past week I got to experience taking 4th graders on a field trip. The students just wrapped up their unit on dinosaurs on Friday. We got to go to the Thanksgiving Point Museum, and while we were there we went across the parking lot to the Art Institute. I had never been there before and it was such a neat experience. Especially since I learned that it is free and that you can go at anytime!

Field trips can be such fun, but I feel that they can also be very draining and nerve wracking. When we were at the art museum I was so paranoid that one of the students might knock over some of the glass pieces that I couldn't entirely enjoy myself. I guess that's the life of a teacher. I realized that as a teacher you have to be ready and willing to go with the flow of things on a field trip. Everything might not go as planned, but that doesn't mean that the entire trip has to be ruined.

SO WHAT

As I mentioned last week, I was very excited to start teaching about mean, median and mode in math. I'm starting to realize how precious time is when it comes to school. All the students had to learn last week was mean, median, mode, range, and order of operations. Unfortunately on Tuesday we had the field trip that took away from math time, plus we had an assembly one day. There just is never enough time in the day to get done what needs to be done.

I think that for the most part the students enjoyed the new concepts they learned in math this past week. I noticed that on their math quizzes on Friday, when I graded them, that the lowest scoring part of their test was order of operations. This tells me that the students didn't have quite enough time to pick up on this skill. This next week I'll have to encorporate it into the rest of the new material they'll be learning. I just wish that it was my own classroom so that I could arrange the day however I want it, so that I could spend as much time on whatever subject as I would like.

NOW WHAT

Starting tomorrow I will be teaching all day except social studies. Which means that I am finally starting my unit on science. SOIL. I have actually been dreading this day since I started my student teaching. Since they are on a rotation schedule for science with two other classes, it means that I get to teach about soil for 3 weeks. This seems like such a long time to me! Not to mention a very boring subject.

I think the thing that I am most scared about is my lack of knowledge on the subject. It's not like multiplication or division or reading - things that I have been doing my whole life and could do with my eyes closed. I don't know that I ever even learned about soil in elementary school. I'm nervous that the students will ask me a question and that I will not know the answer, and they will be able to see right through me. Then they will find out that I don't really know everything! This unit is going to challenge me to be very prepared and to study up on the information I'm teaching. Then again I was scared for math last semester and it turned out just fine, so I'm sure that science will too, hopefully!