Spelling Scramble

Ms. Karr helped me with a new activity this week to help students learn their spelling words, it's called Spelling Scramble. All the spelling words are written on a piece of paper and given to the students. Each word is outlined with a box. All our words this week have a long a, one of them is face. You have the children find the word face and color it red (or whatever color you'd like). You continue this with all the words until every word is colored a different color. After all the words are cut out, assign each student a partner. With their partner students are to cut the letters of the word called out by the teacher and scramble it up. They then trade placesm unscramble the word, spell it as a class, and glue it onto a sheet of paper. This process is continued until all the words are unscrambled. Unfortunatly this week, we did not get to unscramble all the words because it was our first time so it took a while to get into the groove, however, it was still really fun for the students. They really enjoyed playing spelling scramble and wanted to do it again next week. We have an uneven number of students so one student got to play with Ms. Karr. He had a blast trying to "trick" her. He was spelling the words backwards and watching to see if she could fingure it out. I really like this activity, and so did the children. This is one activity I plan to keep in my mind and use in my own classroom. I love how engaged the students were and how much fun they were having. This is a great lesson to show that the novice teach is a facilitator for all learners because students are up moving around (kinesthetic), the words are color coded(Visual), and they are spelling them out loud(Audio.) Thanks Ms. Karr for the great idea!

I'm On My Way...

I believe it was Paul Simon who wrote the lyrics "I'm on my way, I don't know where I'm going." As we finish up this week, I realize that starting next week I'll have taken over every subject except math. So, I am well on my way to full time teaching. However, I am unsure of what to expect in the weeks ahead. These are the same thoughts I had the very first week, and every week thereafter. I have made it this far, I've had my good days (like when Germaine finially started to understand that the vowel sound in CVC words is in the middle), and I have definitely had my bad days (like when Michael threw up all over the place while Mrs. Karr was taking a note to the office----By the way, I handled that suprisingly well!)
Action Research is well on its way too. When I interview Hayden tomorrow I will have completed my first round of student interviews and so far, I have not seen any sign of the students using quick images, or start with/get to to help them answer number sentences. But they are using the dot configirations to represent numbers!
Yesterday was a difficult day for me. Ms. Karr was working on the 5 year plan so I had a substitute. I have nothing against substitutes, however, the never act as good when a substitute is here as when Ms. Karr is here. The sub kept telling me not to worry about it because this is a tough group, but I frustrates me because I know this group of children can behave and act appropriatly when they want to be. That just never happens to be when there is a sub here.
One last thing before I sign out-- the incident of the skanky sock must be shared! Just before we were about to play tap and clap with our spelling words today, just after we came back in from the bathroom, there appeared a dirty smelly sock underneath Damarian's desk. I would have never noticed had Thomas not raised his hand to ask me, "Where did that sock come from under his desk?" Ask he points to Damarian. I asked Damarian if the sock was his and it didn't surprise me when he said no. I thought to myself, dumb question Ms. Burns, what kid in their right mind would claim this nasty thing. So I did what any 'good teacher' would do. I picked it up and threw it in the trash can. Problem solved! Not another word was spoken about it. Needless to say, there is a kid running around this school somewhere with a skanky, unmated sock!