August 2018 blog

Hello everyone and welcome to the beginning of a new semester. I hope everyone had a fantastic summer. I did something really cool this summer, my family and I went on a cross-country trip. Driving from North Carolina north-west toward South Dakota, then to Yellowstone, down to the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon, back up to Moab in Utah, and back east again. It was such a cool but exhausting trip, but it was a trip of a lifetime for sure.

This marks the beginning of the end for me. I am on my last leg of the race to becoming a teacher. There is still so much to do this semester and I am both nervous and excited to be so close to student teaching. This has only been week one of the semester but that ball has already begun rolling extremely fast with great ferocity. For everyone who doesn’t know I am taking EDUC 251, EDUC 435, MAED 330, and EDUC 312 this semester. This week in my clinical setting I have met my CE and toured the school I will be working in. I have attended open house for this school, meeting the students who will be in our class and their parents. I also wrote an introduction letter to the families of these students that will be sent out on the first day of school. This will be something that I will need to do throughout my career so this gave me a good start. Open house was a great experience for me too. Getting to see that from the teacher’s point of view and learning how it can go. Watching how my CE interacted with the parents and ran her part of open house I thought of some ways that I would handle open house for my own classroom. One of the things I noticed was how awkward and forced the conversations with parents were and how little was learned about the parents or the teacher. I think open house is a great opportunity for teachers to really see where their students are coming from and to start a relationship with them and their families. I decided that I would like to have an activity planned for an open house that would give the families a real chance to get involved and get conversations started as well as help me learn about them a little more. One of my ideas was to have a kind of survey where I had multiple bulletin boards set up around the room with questions that the students and parents could answer together. These questions could be something like, “what is your favorite subject?” “What is something you are curious about that you would like to learn this year?” “How many people are in your family?” etc. Setting up a network with parents is an important piece of a teacher’s job, it is even a part of the NCTCS. Standard 2e says that teachers must “work collaboratively with the families and significant adults in the lives of their students”.

Some other things I have done this week in my classes include making an organizing document for the 4 tasks of edTPA. I tried to pick out everything I had to do for each task and make it into a sort of checklist. I think this will help me remember everything as I work on each task. I also started examining and breaking down standard 1a from the NCTCS for another assignment for EDUC 435. Those are the biggest assignments that I have started on so far. I also found and joined a group on Facebook that is made up of a bunch of K-2 teachers who use it to share ideas, ask questions, and help each other out.