Back Into the Fray

Friday morning, I pulled the student aside who had pushed the girl down yesterday.  He of course, denied everything, saying "I don't remember doing that!"  He was so insistent that I almost believed him, but my supervising teacher saw and heard him, so I'm more inclined to believe her over him.  I didn't know what to do about his sudden memory loss, so I just reminded him that swear words are not appropriate for school.  Mrs. J said she would let him know we were onto him and if there were any more instances, we would contact his parents.  With that out of the way, we could continue on with our day.

We did a fun activity in reading to wrap up our study of the book Because of Winn-Dixie.  The students got in groups of three and traced one person.  Then, they decorated the tracing to look like a character from the book.  Afterwards, they had to draw little speech bubbles saying what the character was thinking, speaking, and feeling throughout the book.  The posters turned out really cool and we will hang them in the hallway for everyone to see.  The only thing I would change about this project would be to have them make the posters before watching the movie.  Because we watched the movie first, many groups were using things that happened in the movie and not the book.  They also tried to replicate the movie version of the characters instead of using their imaginations.  If we did the project before, we could compare our versions of the characters to the ones in the movie.

The best part of my day was having students come up to me to ask questions, even though Mrs. J was back in school.  "Miss Heintz, can I go to the bathroom?"  Miss Heintz, can I stay in from recess to work on my homework?"  "Miss Heintz, can I fill up my water bottle?"  These seemingly mundane questions were music to my ears because it showed me that they view me as a figure of authority, someone who can make these decisions.  I think having a sub in the room cemented my role as teacher in their minds.  That was one of my biggest worries coming in to student teaching; I didn't think the students would think of me as a teacher and therefore would goof off while I was teaching.  This is not the case with my 4th graders.  They get more and more excited to learn and keep asking me if I'm going to start teaching more subjects.  Hopefully their enthusiasm keeps up and even more importantly, I hope my passion for teaching remains strong as I start taking over more of the classroom.