Reel It In: Week 6

This week of aiding has been very beneficial for me as a whole.  Like the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot more than just sitting at the back of the room observing.  I've been walking around the classroom a lot.  But, today, I not only got to walk around the classroom, but I got to answer so many more questions from students who trusted my judgment.  Plus, in a class of 26 students and technically 3 teachers, there's a lot of opportunity to help them in what they are doing.

Today in class, we had the usual check in, but then, we went right into a really fun activity!  All of the students have been learning about conflict and the different types.  There's four of them all together:

Each of the students were given two sheets of paper.  They had to use scissors to cut out the different situations, and would later have to glue it onto the second paper that they were given which listed these four conflicts in four columns.  While they were working on placing them in the appropriate category, the three of us walked around asking them how they were doing.  

I got to ask a lot of kids questions, and I really felt like I was teaching them something which has not happened that often in the class.  From prior education classes and my job as a Writing Center tutor, I've learned a lot about how to guide students towards the right answer.  A lot of times, I would ask the students, "Why did you put this in that column?  Why does this not belong here?"  All I did was ask students questions.  I sure was not going to tell them the answer.  It felt good to feel needed and to actually be helpful.

And, it helped that many of the students were focused.  You could tell that they wanted to get it right and try their best.  Some struggled more than others, but the result was still the same.

In the other class that I've been aiding with, we're doing something a little different.  Right now, the 8th graders are learning about Greek Mythology.  One of their biggest projects revolves around this unit.  Their mission:  create their own script based on one of the many Greek myths and perform it.  This project takes up the majority of the semester.  When I came to class today, they were already working on their scripts and ideas for the performance.

The class was split up into 2 groups:  Persephone and Midas.  What they had to do was read over the story 3 times and start writing a script based on it.  From what I was hearing, it sounds like there are a lot of good ideas; I just hope that these 8th graders put all the effort they can into it.  If they do that, I have no doubt that they will succeed.  

While they were working on this, I was able to have another teacher moment.  It wasn't one of those big ones, but it felt kind of good.  Teachers have different strategies to refocus students, but I have developed my own signature way to refocus.  Surprisingly, it kind of works.  One group started straying away from talking about their script, so, using my hands, I mimicked the motions of fishing, and I said, "Reel it in!"  The kids were hooked.  Another time in the same class period, the same group was getting off topic.  So, I mimicked the hand motions again, and one of the girls caught me doing it and yelled, "Reel it in!"  Then, everyone started doing the hand motions.  Luckily, they got back on track and in focus.  It truly was a cool moment.

Overall this week was really fun getting to have those little teacher moments here and there, even if I didn't get to have more teacher roles.  Also, I was able to find out about a cool resource for finding texts or small articles.  It's completely free, and easy to use.  It is called readworks.org.  I'm definitely going to have to use this when I become a future teacher.

My goal for this next week is to find ways to be thankful or things that I am thankful for.  Right now, I'm thankful for those little teacher moments.  I am hopeful that I'll get to experience more of those.