Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 10

In my third grade math support group, the students are learning how to subtract 3-digit from 3-digit numbers with regrouping.  I have been using a hundreds chart with them, but they still struggle sometimes with when to regroup.  In general education classroom, they learned a squaring off strategy to use.  It is where when you have to regroup, you put a square around the top numbers in the hundreds and tens place and take one away from it.  Then you regroup the ones and add ten to it.  It basically skips a step for the regrouping process.  On one hand, I feel like it is a good strategy for the students to use to decrease the chance of them making an error while regrouping.  On the other hand, I feel as if it is just strategy and the students are not learning the actual meaning of regrouping.  I am torn on this strategy.
I am also seeing that the reading support time with my third graders is sometimes used as a time to catch students up on all the work they did not finish in the general education classroom.  I am wondering if that is what the reading support time is supposed to be used for?  Or should I be working with them on the content they are learning in general education, not just catching them up and making sure they finish all of their work.

This was a little bit of a crazy week for both the students and the teachers.  This week was spirit week.  Each day was a different theme (mismatch day, camo day, ugly tie day, school wear day).  So this made for an interesting week.  On Tuesday, it was an early release day.  So the students started to eat lunch at 10:30 and left by 11:40.  So there was an hour and a half of instruction.  On Thursday, there was a 30 minute program for the United Way.  There were many disruptions during instruction this week.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel that there should be some fun things throughout the school year to reward the student and give them a small break from discussion.  However, this week the instruction was minimal, and I feel as if I did not accomplish what I wanted to with the students this week.  Even so, they still have to take their spelling and reading tests today.  I feel like there needs to be better planning to make sure the students are receiving the amount of instruction time they need and eliminating the distractions of instruction.

Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 9

          This Thursday and Friday, I was given the privilege of attending the West Virginia State CEC Conference.  It was such a great experience to be a part of a community of special education educators and to learn from them.  In the future, I hope to become an active member of the CEC state chapter to help myself develop professionally and learn from my peers.  The sessions that I attended were very useful and informative to me as a student teacher.  The first session that I attended was on different apps to use with students on ipads and macs.  The special education room that I am in now has three ipads available for the students to use.  Most of the apps dealt with giving students the opportunity to express themselves without using paper and pencil.  The majority of the apps focused on text to speech, which I had never seen used before on the ipad.  The text to speech allows the student to highlight text or passage and have it read to them.  There were also programs used where you can download free books for students to use with the text to speech.  I feel this will be very beneficial for me to use with my students who are struggling readers.  Also, I plan to use this in my action research with my student who is below level in reading.  I feel it would benefit him to allow him to experience spoken and written language together independently and for it to model how to read aloud properly. 

            The next session focused again on different apps and programs to use as a researcher.  In most cases, we focus on the different programs to assist our students.  However, I have never thought about what programs could assist me while I am researching.  The speaker demonstrated different programs to use on the computer and internet to help us organize our research articles.  The programs would have been so beneficial to me throughout the Benedum Program with all of the research and articles I have worked with.  I now plan to use these great tools in the future to help myself develop as an educator and researcher and to help my students develop their abilities!

          The next session I attended was focused on Policy 4373 in regards to restraining.  It was a very informational session that provided me with information that will be valuable to me as a special educator.  There are many times when teachers in general have to restrain a student, and restraining can be something as simple as stopping them from running away.   This session helped me to make sense of the logistical aspects of restraining and how important it is to be aware of the policies that are in effect to help protect myself and my students.

            

Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 8

Yesterday, my mentor teacher was at a training and there was a sub.  It was very interesting, because the sub depended on me for what to do and where to go.  Since it is my full time teaching weeks, she basically helped me with behavior and with creating resources.  It was very different to have someone looking to me for guidance.
I have started to experience a difficult situation with an intern that I co-teach with.  We have not formed the type of professional or collaborative relationship that I feel is appropriate for co-teaching.  There have been several situations that have occurred with the intern not providing the necessary effort and consideration for co-teaching.  As a special education teacher, I have to base my lessons off of the general education teacher and curriculum.  However, this is difficult because the intern is not sure what she will be doing next week when we talk at the end of the week before.  I am becoming frustrated, because I feel that it is the best for me if I am able to finish my plans at the end of the week before.  The intern did not send me her lesson plans for this week until 11pm on Sunday, and I was already sleeping.  I did not get the lesson plans until Monday night after class.  I was very frustrated being that I have to develop my lessons based on hers.  Today, the students had a math test.  She brought me the test at 8:30am and the test would be at 9:30am.  She said I would need to modify and cut the test for the special education students.  I only had a half hour to do this, because I co-teach in a different classroom from 9:00-9:30.  I have just felt that she is not being considerate to me as a special education teacher or the students who receive services.  I feel that there is a disconnect, but I do not know how to form a connection when we have experienced these issues.  I have offered to make materials or design lessons, and I have also asked if she could give me her lesson plans the week before.  However, she has not wanted my help or given be her lesson plans in advanced.  I feel more as a glorified aide in her classroom.  I am working with my mentor teacher to hopefully come to a finding on as how to handle this difficult situation.  My mentor teacher explained that this does happen more often than not when co-teaching with general education.
I got to sit in on a special education eligibility meeting today.  It was very interesting to see the process of an eligibility meeting compared to an IEP meeting.  The eligibility meeting focused on the reasons for the student being referred and receiving special education services.  I now understand the importance of talking to parents as an equal and not using terminology they may not understand.  It is important to make parents feel as if they are a part of the meeting and not just telling them what will happen.  The parents need to feel as if they are able to be a part of the decision making process and the student’s IEP process.
I implemented a reading lesson with curricular ties with science today with my third graders.  We had been studying penguins the past two weeks, and today, we were discussing the protective layers a penguin has.  The students had to make prediction and observations on the experiment.  The students put petroleum jelly on one hand and left the other plain.  The students were engaged and eager to learn.  The students made really great predictions and observations and really understood the concept of the oil on the penguins’ skin.
 

Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 7

            I experienced a situation where a student cried.  The student has become obsessed with earning stickers, and if he does not earn a sticker for the day, he thinks he did something bad.  However, the way the students earn a sticker is through being focused during the lesson, completing their work, and actively participating.  The stickers are not based on the academic grade.  But, his mom promises him that if he earns all his stickers, he will be rewarded with a new Infinity game or action figure.  If does not earn all of his stickers, his mom only focuses on that.  The student has become obsessed and is worried constantly about earning his stickers.  If he does not earn all of his stickers, he has a meltdown.  We had a discussion yesterday with him that he can no longer talk about or ask about stickers.  The student repeated what we discussed about if he asks about or talks about earning stickers, he will lose his stickers for the day.  Today, at the end of the math support session, he asked if he could have a sticker, and I had to enforce the consequences we discussed the day before.  I asked the student what we discussed about stickers the day before.  He explained that if he asked for a sticker, he would lose his stickers for the day.  He then had a meltdown and started to cry.  It was very hard not to give in, but I had to keep the consequences even though he was upset.  He understood what would happen.  Now, the special education teacher and general education were discussing completely doing away with stickers for him, because he has become obsessed and completely focused on the stickers.

            I was observed by Sarah Steel yesterday, and at first, I was very nervous.  However, once I started teaching it was like nothing was different.  My students and I have been working on Tacky the Penguin this week, and yesterday we completed a writing activity.  We also focused on diversity, and the students were able to recall and summarize what we did the day before with diversity.  It was so good to hear them talk about being different is a good thing, and how they are unique.  They all really accept each other and cheer each other on.  That is the most heartwarming.  They are all pulling for one another, and I hope that they keep that compassion. 

            Throughout the semester so far, I have seen the lack of writing skills the students possesses.  Every week I try to incorporate some type of writing to get the students more comfortable with the writing process.  The students all have great ideas and great discussions, but they have a difficult time putting their ideas onto paper through writing.  I am hoping with the increased exposure to writing, they will feel more comfortable and able to write.  This week, they wrote about how they are unique.  They all thought of very great creative ways that they are unique, and all of the ideas were different.  The students even “performed” by presenting their passage to their peers.  It was a great experience for them and to see them develop over such a short period of time.  I can see their writing developing with being more creative, using correct sentence structure and punctuation, and putting more ideas onto paper.  I hope to see more development over the semester.