Halloween
Halloween - my favorite holiday!
At the school that I'm at for placement, Halloween is the principal's favorite holiday. So, naturally, the school goes pretty all out for Halloween. The teachers and student teachers are allowed to dress up, so I spent my day as Rapunzel from Tangled (she has short hair at the end of the movie!). My fourth graders loved my costume, and I loved theirs. I had a ninja, an army man, Little Red Riding Hood as a murderer, two of those Scream things, a pretty little kitty cat, and others. Because my kids are in the fourth grade, they didn't get to participate in the Goblin Parade (that's for students in PreK - third grade), so we watched the younger kids parade around the school in their costumes, and oohed and ahhed over the cuteness. Maybe it's because I'm getting used to being around fourth graders, but oh my goodness the PreK and Kindergarten little ones were SO itty-bitty!!
After we finished watching the Goblin Parade, we came back into the classroom and I presented my super awesome (if I do say so myself) presentation about this history of Halloween. The kids were really into it!! See, on Tuesday, the kids had asked me if I had anything planned for them for Halloween and I told them I had a presentation about Halloween's history. The looks I got on Tuesday... they were almost like... how dare I make them learn on Halloween? How dare I talk about history on this day? How dare I do this to them? Because I was told right from the beginning that there wasn't any instruction on Halloween. I knew right from the beginning that Halloween was basically a school-wide Halloween party all day. But I wanted to teach. I wanted to do this presentation because, believe it or not (and this is coming from someone who has always HATED learning about history) the day really does have a really cool history.
So based on the reactions on Tuesday, I was a bit nervous about presenting a lesson today. And it wasn't just my class I presented it to. It was my class and the class next door. Only a total of 22 students, so it really wasn't that bad in terms of the number of students in the class. Right from the start, the kids were interested. Right from the start, I had their attention. And that amazed me. And they didn't lose their attention. Granted, my entire presentation (the power point and then the game afterwards) was only about half an hour (I think). But still, I kept their attention. And I was really proud of that fact.
There was technical difficulty at the very beginning -- the SMARTboard wasn't being very... smart. I had gone through my presentation on Tuesday after school, so I knew it should have worked, but it wasn't working right. Not a big deal though. My mentor teacher came up at worked on fixing the SMARTboard while I said to the class "There's a little bit of technical difficulty right now, but sometimes that happens when you work with computers. So, let's talk about Halloween while this gets fixed. Who thinks they might know why we celebrate Halloween?"
Overall, I felt my lesson went really well. The students LOVED it, and some even told me afterwards that they liked it. My practicum teacher observed my lesson. She told me that she thinks I spoke a bit too fast (I know I did. I only had ~25 minutes to get though everything I had prepared) and that it might have been too much information. But the thing about that is that I really don't think it was. After the presentation, I had a jeopardy game made up to review the information that had just been presented to the students. There were 5 categories, each with 4 questions (so a total of 20 questions). Of those 20 questions, there were only two that the students didn't know the answer to.
I was the nice teacher today. I ate lunch with my students in the classroom rather than making them eat in the cafeteria. They liked that, but it's not going to be an every Tuesday/Thursday thing. I might do it once or twice more before the end of my placement. It was interesting to see them while they weren't in a "learning" context - if that makes sense? They really are such cool kids, and really interesting to talk to. And they're so smart in ways that I didn't even realize. One boy today during lunch was listening to the girls talk about the music video for Wrecking Ball, and finally he went over to them and said "She only did that [got naked] because someone else did it first and she was trying to copy them. That's all music videos and everything else today is - just people trying to copy other people." And I mean, smart kid! He's 9 years old and he's got the media and pop culture in general all figured out.
But anyway. I'm tired (it's not even 11 pm yet, but I've been up since 5:30 in the morning), so I'm gonna go crash. Today was so great. My kids were amazing today. They're such great students. They're the reason I do what I do. And I honestly can not wait to have my own classroom someday.
At the school that I'm at for placement, Halloween is the principal's favorite holiday. So, naturally, the school goes pretty all out for Halloween. The teachers and student teachers are allowed to dress up, so I spent my day as Rapunzel from Tangled (she has short hair at the end of the movie!). My fourth graders loved my costume, and I loved theirs. I had a ninja, an army man, Little Red Riding Hood as a murderer, two of those Scream things, a pretty little kitty cat, and others. Because my kids are in the fourth grade, they didn't get to participate in the Goblin Parade (that's for students in PreK - third grade), so we watched the younger kids parade around the school in their costumes, and oohed and ahhed over the cuteness. Maybe it's because I'm getting used to being around fourth graders, but oh my goodness the PreK and Kindergarten little ones were SO itty-bitty!!
After we finished watching the Goblin Parade, we came back into the classroom and I presented my super awesome (if I do say so myself) presentation about this history of Halloween. The kids were really into it!! See, on Tuesday, the kids had asked me if I had anything planned for them for Halloween and I told them I had a presentation about Halloween's history. The looks I got on Tuesday... they were almost like... how dare I make them learn on Halloween? How dare I talk about history on this day? How dare I do this to them? Because I was told right from the beginning that there wasn't any instruction on Halloween. I knew right from the beginning that Halloween was basically a school-wide Halloween party all day. But I wanted to teach. I wanted to do this presentation because, believe it or not (and this is coming from someone who has always HATED learning about history) the day really does have a really cool history.
So based on the reactions on Tuesday, I was a bit nervous about presenting a lesson today. And it wasn't just my class I presented it to. It was my class and the class next door. Only a total of 22 students, so it really wasn't that bad in terms of the number of students in the class. Right from the start, the kids were interested. Right from the start, I had their attention. And that amazed me. And they didn't lose their attention. Granted, my entire presentation (the power point and then the game afterwards) was only about half an hour (I think). But still, I kept their attention. And I was really proud of that fact.
There was technical difficulty at the very beginning -- the SMARTboard wasn't being very... smart. I had gone through my presentation on Tuesday after school, so I knew it should have worked, but it wasn't working right. Not a big deal though. My mentor teacher came up at worked on fixing the SMARTboard while I said to the class "There's a little bit of technical difficulty right now, but sometimes that happens when you work with computers. So, let's talk about Halloween while this gets fixed. Who thinks they might know why we celebrate Halloween?"
Overall, I felt my lesson went really well. The students LOVED it, and some even told me afterwards that they liked it. My practicum teacher observed my lesson. She told me that she thinks I spoke a bit too fast (I know I did. I only had ~25 minutes to get though everything I had prepared) and that it might have been too much information. But the thing about that is that I really don't think it was. After the presentation, I had a jeopardy game made up to review the information that had just been presented to the students. There were 5 categories, each with 4 questions (so a total of 20 questions). Of those 20 questions, there were only two that the students didn't know the answer to.
I was the nice teacher today. I ate lunch with my students in the classroom rather than making them eat in the cafeteria. They liked that, but it's not going to be an every Tuesday/Thursday thing. I might do it once or twice more before the end of my placement. It was interesting to see them while they weren't in a "learning" context - if that makes sense? They really are such cool kids, and really interesting to talk to. And they're so smart in ways that I didn't even realize. One boy today during lunch was listening to the girls talk about the music video for Wrecking Ball, and finally he went over to them and said "She only did that [got naked] because someone else did it first and she was trying to copy them. That's all music videos and everything else today is - just people trying to copy other people." And I mean, smart kid! He's 9 years old and he's got the media and pop culture in general all figured out.
But anyway. I'm tired (it's not even 11 pm yet, but I've been up since 5:30 in the morning), so I'm gonna go crash. Today was so great. My kids were amazing today. They're such great students. They're the reason I do what I do. And I honestly can not wait to have my own classroom someday.
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