Week 10

Monday was my first day full time teaching with a plan period.  It was glorious.  Having my plan period back also helped me communicate with my cooperating teacher better about day to day things.  Even though she has all my lesson plans and she knows what is going on throughout the day, it was nice to have time to analyze and reflect verbally on lessons with her today.  My kids also liked having me back through the whole day.  At least five of them exclaimed something like, "Miss V!!! You're still here!" when they got back from their special today.  They had all kinds of questions about why I was still there and if I would stay all day for the rest of the year.  I also noticed how much the time change over the weekend effected my students.  They were incredibly tired in the morning and a lot of them seemed easily frustrated throughout the day.  Hopefully that will continue to get better throughout the week!

If I'm going to be honest, Tuesday was a blur.  I have been feeling under the weather for a couple weeks now, and Tuesday was one of those days I probably should've stayed in bed.  It was frustrating to me how easily I felt frustrated with my students when I didn't feel good.  It was a good learning experience to practice patience when I felt like I had none left, and when I felt like my head was going to explode.

Wednesday I went to school in the morning and my teacher immediately sent me home.  She took one look at me, asked me how I felt, and told me to go get tested for mono (because she knew my roommates had it a few weeks ago).  I spent the morning on the phone and napping before spending the afternoon in the doctor's office.  My doctor told me that I did, in fact, have mono.  After describing my symptoms and the timeline of them (as well as getting a blood test), it is clear that I had had mono for two and a half weeks already.  He explained that I need to take it easy, meaning that I need to rest when I'm tired, not push myself to make it until a nap time or an early bedtime.  He said the only way to get better was not to push myself, do everything I can not to be stressed, and rest a lot.

After talking to my cooperating teacher, she felt strongly about me taking Thursday and Friday to rest, and feeling the way I did, I agreed.  I literally slept almost 20 hours both days, and continued to sleep a lot during the weekend.  My cooperating teacher and I have come up with a plan for building in some breaks into the days this week so I can rest and hopefully not miss teaching whole class instruction.  I moved around my after school schedule to make sure I can go to bed really early as well.  Since I have reached the three week mark, and have taken care of myself really well the last five days, I'm hoping the worst is over!

The chapter in Schmidt for this week talked about writing.  The first part that caught my eye was how he mentioned that it's important for students to warm up before writing.  It seems so obvious to me now, but I have not given my students opportunities to do that before beginning to write.  One idea I noted that I could use in my classroom was talking about an image from a story or about a topic (i.e. a storm) and asking students to use their fingers to write a word they think of on the palms of their hands (p. 118).  Another thought I noted from the chapter was allowing students to get their ideas down in different ways than at their desk with a pencil and graphic organizer.  Schmidt talked about letting students use big paper and colored markers to make their own idea maps.  While I envision this being incredibly distracting for some of my students, I know it would really help some of the students who need to move around more or need some motivation to focus on writing.  Another thing I read about that I want to keep incorporating into writing is sharing writing.  My students just finished "All About" books and are going to read them to the class this week, but this is the first time all semester that they have gotten the chance to share their writing.  I want to keep giving them opportunities to do this.