Do not know whether to cry or just grin and carry on!

That's a bit what it feels like today.  It was day two of my full control and my associate was off doing meetings all day - she was not there yesterday either.  It feels a little like I am being used as an unpaid relief teacher at the moment - thing is, she is not meant to leave me alone with the class - and so far she has hardly been there while I have been teaching!!!

At the staff meeting tonight I learnt of sports training that I now need to fit in, a visit to a home for the elderly for half a day (been on the books for a while but my associate forgot to mention it) and a whole school, whole day project next Wednesday which I now have to come up with a plan for and it must have an Art focus (no issues really, thought it out in the staff meeting and have already formulated it since being home). 

I know it is just the life of a teacher and these things happen.  But when I see the gaps in knowledge of these kiddo's it just makes me want to cry. 

They had to add a string of simple one digit numbers today, over half of them struggled, and a quarter of them had no idea of what sort of strategy to use to add them up (making tens and making fives). All of these changes effect their maths time the most. 

When I am meant to be teaching both statistics and time during my seven weeks I cannot afford to loose any teaching time.  As it is with how long that it is taking to teach the graphs and graph language I wonder if I will actually get to teach the topic of time at all!!

Today I also had to throw my literacy plan out the window as my kiddos have to do their speeches in front of the class tomorrow and they had been given very little class time (it was only started last week).  I decided that they needed a good solid go at it where I could really help them.  On top of that I had to spring a new list of requirements on them that my associate thought of this morning, which threw them for a loop and meant they needed extra support, but we got there for most of them.

Yup definately felt like crying today, silly thing is its not so much for myself (even if I do not get to use all my planning), but rather for my kiddo's...

Does anyone else feel like that?

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Maths Planning for Statistics completed - at last

It has been a long week sorting out my unit plan for teaching statistics on my placement.  Its been a long process working out what to teach and how to teach it.  Not having any history to fall back to has been hard going.  That and of course repeatedly second guessing myself again and again and again meant it no doubt took a lot longer than it should.  I so want it to be perfect or at least as perfect as possible on paper as it can be.  I am well aware that as planned as I might be on paper when I add that missing ingredient of students all the plans in the world may not save me and it may all have to go out the window.  

The brief for this placement is that we are sole charge teaching for 3 to 4 weeks - of which I am a mixture of excited and cannot wait and terrified.  On this placement we do not have to have detailed individual lesson plans but we must have unit plans and day plans. 

So last night I was deeply satisfied - I thought I had my unit plan nailed, I had teacher talk, student talk, foldables and examples to work through and a big project for them to apply the knowledge to (I even had a cross curricular link to the Inquiry topic they are doing  - go me!!). 

Let me tell you last night was the first sleep I have had in two weeks that did not involved nightmares about lesson plans and teaching I felt that good.  This morning I went on line to check up on the wonderful ladies and guys) that I follow and read a post from Fourth Grade Studio  (http://www.theteacherstudio.com/) that talked about her lesson with the dot plot and getting her students involved in creating and testing graphs for themselves.  That's when I realised my great mistake in my planning, I had not included any part in the first week of the students getting up and testing and applying the concept!!! It has been a long day of typing and re writing and I only had a small break (taking my boys to Iron Man 3 in 3D - okay a 3 hour break, but it didn't feel long) to sort it out.

Although disappointed that I went from yes its all done to how could I be so stupid I am forever grateful that I found out today rather than when on my placement and I loose the students to boredom.

So now at the end of the day and only minutes from bed, I can finally say that it is finished and I am pretty sure I have a good plan up my sleeve.  Now I just need to write a unit on time for my non full control time and I'm done, thankfully with the time one I have all the notes and ideas so for the most part I am ready to go...I think...

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lesson plan stress

There are only 8 weeks to go and I will be back in my class with my wonderful kiddo's again and I cannot wait.  It does mean I will be teaching during my exam time but there is no way around it, I will just have to be organised and focused to get through it all and still achieve everything.  As a result I am already getting organised for planning my Units for my 3-4 weeks sole charge time.

My AT is giving me free range for what I want to do for literacy which is fabulous as I already had an idea for what I want to do (teach writing a picture book) but for maths I am teaching a strand of measurement!

I need to do quite a lot for this strand in a few weeks, standardised measurement with rulers etc including introducing area, time and capacity. It is allowing for a week for each area of the strand which is going to be quite intense, thankfully I am building on their existing knowledge, however their are a few students who are going to struggle with the concepts and others that will fly, so I need to cater for quite a diverse range of students within the lesson plans.  I am so determined not to leave any student behind during my solo teaching time that I am researching and double checking and trying to find a real diverse range of activities and levels to cater to everyone, that I am sure I am now over thinking it and no doubt over planning!!!

Once again the lovely bloggers in blog land and pinners on pinterest are being a great source of inspiration for my planning along with the amazing resource books that are out there so I know I will get there - eventually.  Anyway its time to get back to the books.

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