Intern Posting 9

This week was the first week of teaching 100%. Although I was not adding much more teaching material to my 75% of teaching, I was nervous about teaching Reading on Monday. On Mondays from 10:00 to 11:50, we introduce the new story of the week, review new high frequency words, and discuss our new letter of the week. I had never experienced those activities with the students and I had only watched my mentor teacher do those activities a hand full of times. On the few occasions that I did get to watch her teach these activities, I took notes on the order of which she completed each task so that I would be better prepared when I was doing the teaching.

I try to be as prepared as possible for any new experience in my life so when gathering materials to teach this for the first time, I made sure I had plenty of examples and activities to work on with the students. I also made sure I had back-up material available in case I had extra time toward the end of the lesson. While preparing for this lesson, I even made sure to practice what questions I was going to ask the students as well as determining discussion topics beforehand. I believe that, because I was so prepared, my lesson went very well for a first time.

Before actually beginning the lesson, I was nervous but not as nervous as I thought I would be. I moved right along from technology aspects to the reading aspects, but did struggle a little when introducing the new high frequency words. I do wish I would have spent more time reviewing the old high frequency words. However, my nerves quickly vanished and I became comfortable. I realized that it was just like teaching everything else, it's only a different topic. I loved having this experience and can't wait to have more fun with it next Monday!