Thanksgiving Blues

This past week was a short week for us because of thanksgiving break. Instead of the energy from last week which I was expecting to be more intense this week. I had pure exhaustion from my students instead. I think they were just burnt out and sick of all their teachers testing them this week. Which I have to guiltily say I was one of those teachers. One thing I was working on this week, which isn’t really new but It was a focus this week was communicating with the parents of my students. Last week at the end of the week I sent home a not to the parents of the students who were getting a D or an F in my class. Now this was no new information to the parents of these students. I’ve found that the more I keep that communication with those parents open, the better my students do. The barriers to family relationships is that sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you work to communicate, you just get some parents who wont communicate back.

I email my parents/ guardians, I call home and I send progress reports and letters home to help open lines of communications with my students’ families. As for my students who have learning disabilities I have another very important line of communication and that is with their PDS teachers. Their PDS teachers help my students with learning disabilities stay organized and get their work in. All I have to do is email these teachers about missing work or an upcoming test and they will help me keep that student performing well in my class. I hope that when I have my own classroom we have a similar system put into place for our students with learning disabilities. I plan to do all of the things I’m doing now with the students in my future classroom.

As for using the community in my classroom I can think of so many ways to do this in my future classroom. I’ve already used some of the ideas but I can have my students do a case study on their own community. I can have community members come in and talk with my students about their jobs and how they use psychology to improve the community. Or for history, the history behind their own community. I could do field trips not only to gain more knowledge of the communities history but also to see how psychology has an effect on the people of their community. I could also have my students use their own knowledge to give back to their community. The possibilities are endless, especially with the classes I teach.

As for my goals this week;

1. Treating every class like it’s a new and wonderful class is working better because I stop and pray before each class.  
2. I have another lesson planned that will involve some more co-teaching this week. I planned with my cooperating teacher this time so hopefully it goes better.
3. As for my assessment this past week, my students seemed to do okay on it, not as well as I hoped they would do. I found five questions that over 50 percent of them got wrong so I had to throw those out. They were not reliable. I believe its because these questions were poorly written and they confused my students.
4. Healthy eating went well especially over thanksgiving. I was quite proud of myself.
5. I still need to find more time to just spend with God.  
6. Focusing on the students doing well in my class or the students with positive attitudes have helped me stay positive and this week I’ve been thanking the students who are positive.
7. I have a lesson that is solely using technology planned but I haven’t been able to do that lesson yet. It is coming up next week
8. I learned that there is tons of different available technology to the teachers at the school I’m student teaching at but most of it requires hours of training in order to use it. When I have my own classroom that training would be well worth it.  
9. My plans for the rest of my time student teaching is to successfully co-teach for the last week of full time teaching with my cooperating teacher.
10.  Also I plan to Come up with lessons that take the fullest advantage of co teaching. 

I'm also getting observed this week so pray that goes well. 

~Abby