Internship- Week 3

Week three of internship is still going wonderful. I was able to teach a lesson I created to the classroom as well as many other lessons that Mrs. Thurston had prepared previously. Being placed in a teaching position as a college student can be scary, but through this time I was able to model how I have seen Mrs. Thurston handle different difficult situations. The first lesson I taught to the classroom was a reading lesson. Since my students are so low functioning, I focused on vocabulary in the story and related new vocabulary words to prior knowledge. From this story, students developed a better understanding of the characteristics of love and allowed students to explore different concepts such as emotions, caring for one another, and regular daily activities. Throughout the story, we stopped and recognized different emotions the story was expressing using a board I created. I had students come up to the board and pick out the picture describing the emotion that I was reading about. I wanted to make the story interactive to promote hands on learning. Then I had students pick someone they know and love, and explain why they love them. This way the students were able to apply the words that they have learned. While reading, I made sure to speak slowly, distinctly, and write down key terms on the board. I created an interactive board and cut out pictures I found online of many different emotions and activities expressed in the book. As I read each page, I asked students if they could find a picture of the emotion or activity I mentioned from the group of pictures. I decided to use pictures on the board in order to emphasize visual literacy. The lesson went really well and I was glad to be able to provide vocabulary instruction to the classroom. After evaluating students, they seemed to get a great understanding of some of the words that were reviewed. (REC 6.5)