Alison’s 260 Weblog

This Thursday was the final day at Melrose elementary in Mr. L’s 1st grade classroom.  There were ups and downs for the week including a lesson by myself in everyday math in which I felt like I was constantly trying to pull the students back into the lesson after being distracted.  But overall it was a good week.  As far as my overall experience at Melrose, I really enjoyed it.  It was great working with Angela and Danielle within the classroom especially when using everyday math manipulative items as well as checking math hw during the lesson so we could move on.  It was also fun to bounce ideas off of each other for other lessons and see other teaching styles.  One issue I found was that the 1st graders had trouble seeing us all on an equal level of respect for us during out lessons.  Maybe this is just my opinion when I was teaching but I felt that the students were just overtaken by all the outside help that they saw me as more of just an outside helper and not a teacher because I was only in there for a couple hours each day whereas Angela was in there for the entire day, everyday.  I also found it hard to get opportunities to create lessons in other topics outside of everyday math.  Angela was doing an awesome unit in social studies with traveling the world and seeing different cultures.  Because of this I only was able to have options teaching math lessons.

Overall I enjoyed working with the two other girls but with the few downsides I would suggest maybe keeping the max of field teachers in the room at 2.  That way working on team teaching is avaliable but it also limits the amount of people the students are exposed to.