Patience is Key

This week has been filled with lots and lots of highs and a few lows. I am really getting a grasp on the kind of teacher that I want to be. I am learning the effective ways for getting students attention, disputes between children, teaching and giving instructions. I found this week that I need to be much more precise with my instructions and to make sure that I give them all clearly before I pass out the assignment. I have gotten better with this as the week has progressed.

We are working on descriptive writing and detail, so on Monday I had the students do an assignment that they absolutely loved. I told them that I was an alien and that I had never had or seen candy before. I also told them that they were the candy experts, and using their five senses they had to describe the candy that I gave them. We went through each sense and I really tried to pull words out of the children and get specific detailed words. The things that they came up with were amazing! They loved the idea that they had to teach me something. I believe that it is so important that the teacher is not always teaching and the children are just learning, a good classroom has these roles reversed and intermingled constantly. The next day we had a discussion about those words that we used to describe the candy and how those are adjectives and adjectives add so much life to our writing. Then, I told them how adjectives paint the picture of something for us. So I had students close their eyes and I described something with great detail and then had them tell me the picture that they painted in their minds. Next, I had an adjective song printed out that we learned and sang together and then glued into our writing books (we will practice this everyday).