Beth, This One's For You!

So I participated in my first Writing Workshop experience in an elementary classroom! Until now, everything I've seen in a classroom has either been nothing like the writing workshop model. After reiterating to my teacher how much I really value writing workshop, she agreed and started planning it that way. After using the 4-square model and other prewriting tools for several days, my teacher let my students just write. They were so eager to actually take their prewriting and make it a solid piece of writing. There are several teachers during writing: my mentor teacher, myself, the EIP teacher, and three days a week the gifted teacher. So we were able to go around and have mini conferences with each student. I was so excited to read what they were writing. Oh, I think I was able to give some good suggestions, something I'm not always confident about. What's great is that we all collaborated and planned the mini/focus lessons for next week, rotating the lead teacher every day. We also got everyone on the same page and agreed that the students should have the majority of the time to write, and to write about what they WANT to write. I really pushed for no prompts, at least not yet. What's really cool is that we are each going to have student-teacher conference notebooks. Each of us will work with a few students all the way from prewriting to publishing, and we are going to use our notebooks to track our conferences and set goals with the students. Having so many teachers means that we can really hit every student and conference with them multiple times a week. I'm really excited about all of this, which probably sounds ridiculous and lame to non-teachers, but I don't care. I can't wait to start!

A Place of My Own

I got my own desk today! So far, I have been taking over the kidney table at the back of the room, which was fine. However, one of the janitors told my teacher about an extra desk he had, and my teacher asked if I could use it. So after school we rearranged things and put our desks facing each other. I feel so official now! In other news, I stayed until after 6 this evening. We had another team planning meeting and then my teacher and I moved the desks, organized a lot of stuff, and basically started getting our shit together. I feel better about a lot of things, but still overwhelmed with other things like lesson plans. Not to mention, I take over reading in 2 weeks and my teacher hasn't even figured out how to implemented her own way of teaching reading. She uses The CAFE Book, which I am not familar with. But she hasn't done anything from CAFE since week 1. How am I supposed to plan using CAFE if I've never seen it? Anyway, that's my mini issue right now.

So Much To Do; So Little Time

I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this blog up. It's only the second week and I already feel so overwhelmed. If I'm this busy now, how is it going to be when I am teaching everything for 3-whole weeks? Anyway, tomorrow my mentor teacher will be gone for the afternoon, which means there will be a sub. What this really means is that I am teaching Social Students and ELT (Extended Learning Time). Even though I officially take over responsibility for ELT next week, I have taught the students during ELT all this week. I basically do things off the cuff, and luckily it seems to be going pretty well. I will be glad when I have actual lesson plans to follow next week. I like planning ahead and putting more thought into lessons before teaching. In fact, I'm going to start on my lessons now.