I don't even know where to start for my field response! I had such a blast during field. I had such a great time with my fourth grade classroom and learned so much from our cooperating teacher and the students. I wasn't sure what to expect at first because our cooperating teacher is from the East coast and likes to speak her mind. I was just afraid of what she'd say about our teaching. : ) She turned out to be an awesome teacher with a lot of great feedback. She let us take over reading groups, teach multiple lessons, be creative, and encourage technology in the classroom. Everyone was very welcoming and this experience made me all the more excited to eventually have a class of my own.
I learned a lot about classroom management techniques and that what works for some students may not work for others. She used the elementary school's theme song to bring students back on task, she used hand signals to bring the class back. She never raised her voice or was demeaning to the children. I also learned a lot about preparation and how important it is. We were very detail oriented on our lesson plans and had many late nights perfecting them and working out the kinks. We also learned as we went and got a feel for how this particular class worked together and functioned. Our cooperating teacher, Mrs. Schino, runs a tight ship but she does it with love and out of a pure desire for her students to have a successful learning experience. I learned a lot about the teacher I want to be. I want to be fun and understanding but firm in my decisions. I've learned a lot about who I am and the talents I have and how they can be incorporated into the core curriculum. I love to write raps and rhymes and being able to use those in our lesson plans really engaged the children in introducing them to a new topic.
Our lesson plans went smoothly and we got along great with the teacher and students. We created a mutual trusting and respectful relationship which enabled us to have great lessons with the students. We found out what worked for the students and what didn't by making observations and trial and error. The only thing I would do differently is being better about time restraints. In a perfect world lessons for each core curriculum would fit perfectly into a time slot and things wouldn't run over in time. In the real world it happens all the time. It was really difficult at first to stay within a time constraint but our cooperating teacher was very patient and kind to us while we worked that kink out. This happened during the first couple of lessons but it was eventually worked out and perfected bit by bit the more we taught.
During this experience we got to use "The Utah Experience" digital story. The kids absolutely loved it. Their eyeballs were glued to the screen the entire time the story was playing. It engaged them immediately into our new unit on the symbols of Utah and helped them answer questions they would need answered for an assignment. Now that I know how to make one, the next time I will use one in class it will go a lot faster and I can teach the students how to make one themselves. I will definitely use digital storytelling in my classroom. I've only had positive experiences with it. We also got to use a document camera to help the students while we made Utah salt maps. It made life so much easier for all of us because I could project what I was doing on my salt map (molding, sculpting, putting the proper colors and landforms where they belonged, etc.) onto the projector and the entire class could watch me from their seat as we did the project together. It was very beneficial to have one and these could be used for any subject. Math, writing, history, for pictures, giving examples of work, and many other things. Our cooperating teacher used the document camera many times during our field experience and it benefited the kids greatly. Our teacher has an appreciation for technology and is working on incorporating more of it into her classroom. She also loved the digital story and wanted to know how long it took us. I think she was trying to figure out if she would ever want to put forth the extra effort to make one. We explained that after the first one, it's a lot easier to do and it would be a great idea to begin incorporating them into her curriculum.
