First day of teaching!

Today was my first actual day of teaching, as we spent the first week observing and deciding on which classrooms we wanted to work in.  I will be teaching Math, English, and Reading in my P1 class.  But today I just taught English and reading.  After spending hours preparing last night, I felt confident going into my lessons today.  I knew my lessons well and knew what my goals were for the students and myself. 

I first taught English.  I started by having the kids loosen up a bit by playing a game of Simon Says.  It got the kids out of their seats and gave them a little break so they would be ready to learn.  The curriculum for the day instructed me to teach the words morning, afternoon, evening, and night.  And in English they must be able to read the word, spell the word, define the word, draw a picture of the word and use it in a sentence.  And all of this for some rather abstract words.  I had the kids do an activity where they moved around to try and put some pictures representing the words into chronological order.  This went fine.  The most difficult teaching point for me was teaching the spelling of the words.  What Katie and I have realized is that the kids have never learned the sounds that letters or strings of letters make.  This means that students are not able to sound out a word when they are trying to spell it, or when they are trying to read it.  This presents me with a challenge, how do you spell without knowing what sounds each letter makes?  Their answer to this is repetition and memorization.  Unfortunately, repetition and memorization do not always equal learning.  Hmmmm….Right now I am still trying to figure out how I am going to teach English in a way that allows the students to actually learn and comprehend the vocabulary. 

For reading today I started by introducing fluency to the students.  I want the students to learn to read fluently so they can gain confidence as readers as well as to aid in comprehension.  I made an anchor chart for the students that listed the three main components of fluency that I want them to focus on including reading accurately, loudly, and with personality.  After going over this with them, I sang a song about the days of the week that we would be using as our fluency piece this week (since the students would be learning the days of the week for vocabulary later in the week).  I then had the students sing with me.  We will continue to sing the song each day, and by the end of the week if students feel ready, they will have an opportunity to sing by themselves and demonstrate their fluency.

I then did a read aloud with the class.  I had the students come and sit on the floor with me, which they were very excited about, as this was clearly something they had never done before.  The students seem to really enjoy read-alouds, and it provides another opportunity for me to gauge reading comprehension from my students.  I hope to do daily read-alouds. 

Next the students read by themselves.  I sat one-on-one and read with one student.  She was really struggling throughout the book.  This told me first that the book she was reading was too difficult for her and that I need to go to the school library and pick out some more appropriate books for my students.  But she also demonstrated to me how hard it is for the students to read without learning letter sounds.  She wasn’t able to sound out any words at all.  The only words she knew were those that she had memorized.  But this meant that even small words such as an or in were often times mixed up, because her reading of these words was based solely on memorization. 

So looking at the strengths and weaknesses of my lessons from today, I spent the night planning new lessons for tomorrow.  I tried to incorporate more of my own teaching style, while still using the schools’ somewhat limiting curriculum.