Division Concepts
The above link will take you to a video clip of myself teaching division concepts to a 3rd grade class. These students are mostly English Language Learners and I made the content accessible to them by providing them with opportunities to collaborate, work with manipulatives and utilize their background knowledge. I also implemented several SDAIE (Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English) strategies that have been proven to benefit English Language Learners. These strategies include repetition, paraphrasing, the use of multiple modalities and providing prompts and cues.
Daily Five
The "Daily Five" is a teaching strategy and structure that helps students to develop daily habits of reading, writing, and working independently so that they can become lifelong learners. Students are given the opportunity to self-select and work in the areas of: reading to self, reading to someone, listening to reading, working on writing and working on spelling. This program, developed by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, can be easily implemented into every classroom and is currently in place in the 2nd grade class I am presently student teaching in. I have the wonderful opportunity to help manage the different centers, listen to students reading, create an environment that fosters literacy and encourage creativity and thoughtful expression.
A Montessori Fine Art Curriculum
I designed and implemented this curriculum in a K-2 classroom. I used fine art as a way to introduce human values.
Fossil UnitAfter studying fossils and how they can help us learn about the past, students used tools to dig up their own 'fossils.'
Personal Narratives"Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone." Amy Tan My 2nd grade students have been working on personal narratives for the past two and a half weeks and in an effort to increase their motivation towards writing and their academic achievement in writing, I stated at the beginning of the project that their stories would be shared with their families, friends and classmates during an author's celebration. We counted down the days, kept our eyes on the deadline, shared different stages of writing with one another and wrote, wrote wrote. I put together their illustrations and final writing pieces into individual books and found a site that would publish their stories into a 'real' hard cover book for free! The class is given a complimentary copy and parents could purchase additional copies at a reasonable price. Because our classroom has 1:1 iPods, the students recorded themselves reading their stories (they even added a statement like, "When you hear the beep, turn the page...."). These voice memos were uploaded to the class website and a QR code was made for each voice memo. These QR codes are on the front cover of each book. My master teacher and I hosted an author's celebration and students were able to share their work with their parents, other teachers, and classmates. School and district administrators also attended and the students loved their positive feedback and affirmations. So proud of these writers! |
Students' 'fossils' |