During Spring Semester of 2020, I completed a 16 hour field experience where I was co-teaching AP Spanish 3 at Ursuline High School, a private high school in Youngstown, Ohio. This field experience was intended to be my completion of my Spanish minor. My main job every day was have conversations with the students in Spanish to try to get them talking, something that there is not much time for in a single-teacher classroom. I started out by talking to one student at a time and eventually got the students to the point of being able to have small group conversation sharing ideas between each other. The teacher provided me with topics that lessons would be over so instruction time was not lost, then I turned each topic into controversial questions to get the students to debate with each other in Spanish.
During this field, I noticed that at first the students would speak very slowly, trying to have perfect grammar and wanting to give up when they make mistakes. I believe that I reached my goal because, at the end of my field, I had the students carrying on conversations at a faster pace and working to find a way to say what they want to say. The students began making more mistakes, but they were no longer afraid to make mistakes. When the students came to a point where they did not know how to express what they wanted to say, I told them to find another way to say it, and they usually did.
0 Comments
During a summer class which I took at Youngstown State University, the main requirement of the class was to complete 25 hours of reading based tutoring. As a middle level math and science major, I was itching to somehow include math or science into as many of my lessons as I could while making the sessions as painless as possible for the student with whom I was working as he was giving up time out of his summer break to work with me.
One day while figuring out what to do for the that day's lesson, I looked out the window and knew that if my student looked out the window, he would be lost from the lesson almost immediately seeing the beautiful summer day. Then it hit me, I needed to take the lesson outside for the day. For that day's lesson, I checked out a non-fiction book about different kinds of trees and the life cycles of trees. I then broke the book into several talking points, and was ready for an outdoor lesson. During this lesson, I walked around the college campus with my student and we made several reading stops where the student read a few paragraphs from the book related to trees around that area of campus. This activity provided the reading skills which my college class required, the science skills which I love to teach, and was presented in a way that made the student want more and want to do more with the assignment. He was making connections from the book to what he saw during the walk around campus, gaining and understanding and engagement with the book that never could have been achieved sitting at a table in the local library. In January of 2018, I had the opportunity to complete a 35 hour field experience teaching in Campbell Local School District, a suburb a Youngstown, Ohio. During this field, I had the opportunity to observe four different teachers, two of which were general education teachers, the other two were special education co-teachers.
This experience allowed me to observe and participate in co-teaching, along with the opportunity to teach full classroom lessons. During this experience, I spent two days observing and co-teaching in an 8th grade math classroom, the other three days were spent in a 7th grade math classroom. During my time working with individual students, small groups, and teaching full classroom, I was able to implement different theories that I studied. Knowing and studying the theory behind educational practices is extremely important, and it allowed me to be successful during my first true experience with teaching. Please contact me for any more details about this field experience. The first day with a new educator can be very intimidating for students. As educators, it is crucial to have a powerful activity on the first day that makes the students want to be engaged in our class, along with giving us information about the students. All too often, I see educators turning to a worksheet that has the students write their names and a few fun facts about themselves. I have noticed that these often lead to one of two outcomes: the students write the exact same thing for every class and only do it to get through it, or students struggle to think of what to say about themselves out of fear that their stories won't be as exciting as others. To solve the issue of what to do with my students on the first day of a tutoring field in McGuffey Elementary School, part of Youngstown City Schools, I turned to the augmented reality app "Quiver." I found a Quiver page where the students are able to draw important aspects of their lives onto a circle, then the app pulls their drawing up onto a sphere making their most important things appear to be on a globe. The activity was intended for the students' worlds to become a "world." From here, the students described to me what they drew and what it means to them. This was a great gateway activity to conversation and allowed me to get to know my students and I even learned a little bit about where they stand academically.
This activity was successful because it took away any student fear of making any grammatical mistakes in front of me before they even knew me. It allowed the students to express to me who they are without any fear. From this lesson, I was able build activities that the students would be interested in. This activity also showed the students that I would be creating fun activities that they would enjoy while completing some difficult tasks. Looser, J. (2013). QuiverVision [Computer Software]. New Zealand. While working with two 4th grade students during a field experience at McGuffey Elementary in Youngstown City Schools, I created a lesson that incorporated reading fluency, reading comprehension, writing skills, and the students gained the ability of writing letters.
This lesson began with the students partner reading "The Little Mermaid." The students decided to read this story from a collection of Disney Stories. The students used their knowledge of how to navigate a compilation by choosing the story from the table of contents, then finding the story in the book. Throughout the reading, the students were asked to discuss with each other as well as with myself different aspects of the reading including important topics and characters. One of the main points of the story was that "the Little Mermaid," Ariel, fell in love with a human, Prince Erik, but could not talk to the prince out of fear of being found and captured by humans. Following the reading, the students created their own postcards, writing from the point of view of Ariel, writing to Prince Erik, explaining what the students thought that Ariel might like to say to the Prince. Through this activity, the students were required to think deeply and make inferences about what Ariel might have been feeling and what she might want to say based on what was read in the story. The students also gained experience in how to write letters. They learned how to address a letter as well as the basic components of an informal letter. I believe that the students gained reading and writing skills through this lesson that they will be able to relate to other lessons in the future. (1991). The little mermaid: Ariel's underwater adventure. In Western Publishin Company, Inc. (Ed.) A treasure of Disney little golden books 22 best-loved Disney stories. Racine, WI. |
|