Cupcakes, Plants, and Leprechauns

I am officially done with my eighth week of student teaching, meaning that I am halfway done with my experience! With each passing week, I have learned more from Mrs. H., such as new ideas she has and advice inside and outside the classroom. With her ideas, I build on her ideas or I come up with a new way to teach it, and I wanted to share some of the outcomes.

When I first started teaching writing, I was given the idea to have students think of four people from the past or present or characters to sit at their "dinner table." Little did I know that these kids thought outside the box! I had half the class inviting Kylo Ren, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and BB8 to their dinner table, while others invited celebrities and athletes. (Joey Votto is a very popular athlete in the classroom by the way.)

Another previous writing assignment was during review week last week when there was a review theme for reading, which meant that I could teach anything thematic. In this case, I instructed the class to come up with a plan to catch a leprechaun and what they would do once he or she was caught. The students LOVED this assignment. All they had to do was brainstorm at least five ideas and write ten steps to catch their leprechaun with an illustration. The student below wrote seven pages, a lot more than what I was expecting! Both assignments are currently placed on the walls outside, gaining the attention of students from other classes as they walk by, which makes me feel great.

At the beginning of the month, we finished a unit about ecosystems and the overcrowding of plants and animals. In this case, I set up a month-long experiment about the overcrowding of seeds. I randomly put students in groups and gave students two cups full of potting soil. One cup had five seeds of perrenial flowers and another was filled with grass seed. On the day the seeds were planted, each group had to write a hypothesis on what they thought was going to happen at the end of the month and about two to three times each week throughout February to visit the lab and make their observations on what they saw. At the end of the month, this is the final product:

Students will be able to conclude on Monday that the cup full of grass seed doesn't have a lot of room to grow while the perennial seeds had plenty.

Lastly, I did some additional work on my own outside of school. Last Thursday, I was the only one of four student teachers to help with Cupcakes and Canvas. Other staff had signed up, but plans changed, so it was only myself, the art teacher, and a first grade teacher forty-five minutes before the event started. In this case, I vigorously pumped paint onto nearly one-hundred plates and passed out paintbrushes and other art items while the assistant principal had to show up and the evening-shift janitors had to stop their shifts to help out. At the end, five families stopped to help us clean up, which was very awesome of them. Once everything was clean, the art teacher gave me her example she used for the event as a thank you for going above and beyond for helping out.

Even though I didn't attend the school meeting on Monday, the assistant principal took time out to informally recognize me for working my hardest to make the event run smoothly, despite the massive number of hiccups that happened throughout the night.

I have also come up with a writing idea for next week since March 2nd is Dr. Suess's birthday and I'm really excited to share the outcome in the coming days.

Until then,

Sarah