Friday, March 7, 2008

SCORE!!!!

Wow, I don't see how my lesson could have gone much better this morning. Well, ok, *I* see how it could have, but the important thing is my supervisor doesn't.

The lesson -- which if I never said, was on rhyming -- went really well and after about 3 minutes my nerves were gone and everything felt so natural and I just had a really good time. The kids did GREAT. After reading the Shel Silverstein poem "Spaghetti" and identifying the rhymes, we went through with my plan to sing through all 18 personalized verses of "Down by the Bay" that each student wrote. They wrote verses and drew pictures on Tuesday, so today I had each student come up when I showed their picture and we did indeed sing 18 VERSES of Down by the Bay!!! I was mostly nervous about the students getting fidgety, but it didn't last as long as I thought it would and they were overall pretty durn good for kindergartners!

Now for the conference afterwards. Let's boil it down to this: we are scored 1-5 in about 30 different skills. 1 is the lowest, 2 isn't any better than one really, 3 is satisfactory and where we should be at during internships, 4 means you do this skill better than most first-year teachers, and 5 means you do this skill so well that you could teach others to do it.

When it came to communication with the students, my supervisor said in a very matter-of-fact tone, "We aren't supposed to give 5's but I did it anyway" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She continued by saying that I have an "innate ability" with this age group and that I was made to be a teacher.

Well this is where I started to cry. What a loser am I!?

She also gave me a handful of constructive criticisms which of course I am so grateful for. She helped me to expand on my Professional Development Plan (where we discuss our areas needing improvement, our strategy for improving them, and our deadline to complete them). She did insist that I remove "planning creative, concise, and engaging lessons" from the needs improvement list since she believes I've already mastered that (!!!!!!!). I am in such a joyous state of shock I cannot begin to explain.

So my overall score was a 4, which I couldn't be more happy with. And I can't wait to be back again on Wednesday :) My next "observed" lesson will actually be a video of my science lesson that I am already working hard on. Now it's time to focus on my assignments for my actual college classes that are coming due. A pre-service teacher's work is never done! :)

Thank you to Shelley for your support and your interest in my blog, and to all of the people I've spoken with on the phone and in person who have encouraged me this week and always!!

Much love guys,
Jamie

1 comment:

House of Smiths said...

YEAH!!! I'm so happy everything went well! I KNEW you would do great!! I'm really NOT surprised that your mentor lady was impressed. You are AWESOME with kids!! And your ARE going to make an amazing teacher. I'm really happy for you Jamie. Good luck on everything else.
Sorry this is kind of short, I would love to write more, but I have two two year olds crying at my feet for "A dink of warter!" LOL. Love ya
Shelley