Student Teaching

During this past year I have been interning at West View Elementary in a bilingual kindergarten classroom. I can say with confidence that it has been the most challenging and most rewarding experience I have ever encountered. My cooperating teacher is a firm believer in pushing children regardless of age, race, ethnicity, gender, or background, to the very highest they can achieve. However, as a result, her children are not only prepared for first grade, but also far above standard.
I have been learning this past year how to take a room full of children who come from two very different socioeconomic and language groups, and teach them how to become a community of learners. I have found that being the "nice" teacher does not mean being the best teacher and that structure, routine, and meaningful activities help children feel safe, cared for, and motivated in the classroom.
Some of the major units we have been focusing on this year have come from our science and social studies curriculum. We focused on the body parts of a fish and then skipped over to map making during our Christopher Columbus unit. While planning these units it was very helpful to think back to our social studies seminar in creating activities that allowed children to achieve standards by means of oral, pictoral, kinesthetic, and even written representations.
By far, the most challenging piece of teaching in a dual language setting, is making all of my content perfectly comprehensible for children who do not speak the language I am teaching in. In math I have to be constantly thinking about how to model with my hands and teach the most important vocabulary the students need to succeed. In science, I need to be mindful that over half of the class does not understand what I am saying so it is even more necessary to engage children in songs, picture labeling and drawing, repetition of vocabulary, and play acting.
In science (but also branching into literacy) we are studying the pumpkin life cycle. I am planning to use many of the GLAD strategies that West View as a school has embraced this past year. I am going to make up a classroom chant, have a pumpkin word wall that emphasizes key vocabulary, do a pictorial labeling the different phases of a pumpkin's growth, and hopefully many other activities that will make my teaching more effective and more in tune with my objectives. For my PPA I may focus either on the life cycle of a pumpkin or perhaps our Day of the Dead unit which is coming up in a week and a half (AHHHHH!!)
Some aspects of teaching that I do know to be absolute truths are the following: that

• there is not enough time to get anything done
• one hour of activities takes four hours in preparation
• I can teach an entire lesson piece by piece and then have some little girl come up to me saying "Que hago?"- (So, what do I do?)
• 7 in the morning is still not early enough to get to school
• you start to dream about school- its like you cant get away
• I could go on for two years, but have much work to do

Til next time!