WOW! It has been a long time since I last posted about practicum! We have had some crazy weeks here in Tennessee. After winter break, most of the population in my city either had the flu or strep. On top of that, I am pretty sure I haven’t seen the sun since December! It has been raining every day! I say all of this because I have not been to a full week (both Monday and Wednesday) of practicum in almost a month due to school being out for sickness, rain, and other things. I am so excited to share what has taken place this week!
Monday was a typical day for my practicum experience. I helped multiple students with morning work which was making a sentence with given words. That is a specific skill that most students in the classroom are still struggling with, therefore, the morning work for the past few weeks has been revolving around sentence cohesiveness. At this point in the school year, the skills group is learning about the writing process. Last week, they wrote a descriptive paragraph about grapes to work on planning, drafting, editing, etc. This week, each student is selecting to do a research project on either Great White Sharks or Mandrills. To introduce this project, I read a picture book to the class that gave basic information about Great White Sharks and their 6 (yes, six!) senses.
Wednesday, the students were SO excited to see me. I attribute that to the fact that I have become more comfortable in the classroom and I am interacting with the kids a lot more than I used to. I was working one-on-one with a student this morning who didn’t really need my help, but she insisted that I help her. While we worked on making sentences, she asked me if I would be there on Thursday. I explained that I am only at Jere Whitson on Monday and Wednesday. All of the sudden, she got a little sad and said, “We don’t have school Monday, so I have to wait till Wednesday to see you?” and oh my gosh, it melted my heart. Similarly, my teacher asked me to work with the group of girls in Skills and practice tricky words that don’t follow the rules. When the girls heard that they were getting to work with me, they cheered and ran up to hug me as I was walking over. I had planned on writing the words on the whiteboard and having them spell it with stickers but all of the girls insisted that I sit with them on the rug so that we could all be a group.
Thinking about the purpose of this practicum, it is definitely to gain hands-on experience in a real classroom setting. It is supposed to give me days where the whole class is wild and other days when the schedule is messed up and everything is chaotic. Not only am I getting to see real life situations and how to handle them, but I am forming incredible relationships with these kids. They respect me as a teacher figure in the classroom and, at the same time, they all have so much excitement and love for me. I love interacting with the students and being able to teach as a senior in high school! It is my favorite part of every week.
Big apologies for the long post!! I have so much passion for teaching that I could seriously talk about it all day!! It is experiences like this that assure me that I am positively primary!
Positively Primary 