Final Countdown

Monday started our final week in Isla Bontia Elementary School.  I have been teaching along side of my partnership teacher.  I was able to teach math, language arts and social studies.  As I have said many times before, it has been a journey to get the students to follow simple directions.  One of my students has a real big issue in behaving and I think we have finally realized why she behaves like that. So one of the graduate students that is here helping and doing her own work came into my classroom today.  She helped out with my student a lot.  She wrote 3 basic rules for her and drew a picture of each of them.
number 1 - sit in your seat
number 2 - raise your hand
number 3 - use your quiet voice

She then had 10 lines and she had to earn 10 stars to get her reward, which was one cookie.  She was really excited about that.  She did very well because she had continuous support from all of the teachers coming in and out of the classroom during the day.  I also sat down with her and helped her out for a while and that's when she did earn her cookie.  However, at the end of the school day (after lunch) I was told I was going to be by myself and teaching social studies (I didn't prepare anything since I wasn't originally teaching it).  So, here I am teaching in the class all by myself from 1-2 pm (they get out of school at 2 pm).  I was just winging what my teacher briefly told me to review with them.  It was very wild in the classroom especially with the one who already has behavior problems.  I couldn't help her and then help the rest of the class.  It was very frustrating for me to be in there because I felt like all of that hard work with that one student was just being tossed to the side.  I know I couldn't have helped the reasons why I had to be by myself for that hour.


Tuesday

Today, I had to sub for my teacher and luckily she gave me her plans for her lessons that she was supposed to be teaching. It was a decent day overall because they are finally starting to understand the behavior management that I am trying to put in place.  I really feel like today could have definitely been better but because my teacher was not there it was something different.  They did all of their work very well and they were able to play a fun game.  I played a hangman except I drew a face when they said a wrong letter.  They loved it!  For the little girl that has more extreme behavior we did the 10 stars again.  She did well the first time around, but then as the day went on she didn't earn her next set of stars : (

The students really enjoy the team game I play with them. At the end of each day a team wins! They get something simple (pencil, eraser, etc) from me. However, I might need to change that up a bit just to keep them on their toes.

I really enjoyed the math lesson we did today. We are working on fractions (whole, half, thirds and quarters) and then we are slowly doing equal parts.  Today I gave two students a set of pencils and they had to figure out how many they could each have.  However, they both needed to have the same amount of pencils.  I, of course, put enough pencils so they would each get the same amount.  Many of them did it correctly, but there were some of them that needed some help. 




Tomorrow is going to be another fun filled day because my teacher is going to be out again! Thursday and Friday we are going to sub again for all of the teachers so they can go to a conference in Belize City.  What a week we are having!