Happy Sunday friends!
I am SO excited to announce the winner of our $25 TpT giveaway! Congratulations Laura R!! Be sure to check your e-mail for your prize! And make sure you stop by Laura’s blog to see all about her experience teaching grades 3-5!!
The super amazing Mrs. Cahill and I are back to present part 4 of our co-teaching series- Making It Count.
Seriously, as if you don’t know this already, having a student teacher can be such an amazing process. Utilizing another body in the classroom can be so much more than the basics. When I went through my student teaching, I was definitely not utilized to the best of my ability. I don’t think it’s because I was unwilling or my mentor teacher didn’t want me to help out. I just think neither of us knew how best utilize my time in the classroom. After my mandatory teaching time, I helped out here and there, did DRA’s & Dominie’s, and helped manage the classroom. But it was nothing like what Mrs. Cahill did in our classroom. Compared to Mrs. Cahill, I didn’t do anything. At all.
Like I mentioned last week, as soon as Mrs. Cahill finished with her mandatory student teaching time, we started looking at data. Using pages very similar to these– we would use standards based assessments and would input each standard into the top part of the page and then while looking at the assessments, take notes on how well students grasped each concept.
From there we would form groups. Kiddos that more than grasped the concepts, would even be “grouped”. From there Mrs. Cahill got to work. {She got to work… and let me plan, plan, plan and do my teacher thang. Again, she’s totes awesome}
During math workshop time, she would pull a small group for 10ish minutes and present a little mini lesson {on top of what I had already done} and then give them a math game to play that correlated to her mini lesson. If we didn’t have a game, she made one. She even pulled 6th and 7th grade lessons and began challenging other groups. Like we stated last week, we would reassess ever six weeks and regroup. We tracked growth by using small pre and post assessments. Mrs. Cahill did all of the tracking and grouping and planning. All I had to do was continue my lesson planning. And like we also mentioned before- she saw growth and progress out of all students. It. Was. Awesome!
I still pulled my own groups and continued my own interventions and differentiation- but by allowing Mrs. Cahill to focus on these groups- she was able to do more. More than I would ever be capable of doing! I am not ashamed to admit my short comings! By having Mrs. Cahill in the classroom, so many kiddos were able to learn more, get gaps filled in, and just genuinely grow. Thank goodness for Mrs. Cahill. I wish I had been able to add as much to my student teaching classroom as she added to ours.
Now go on over and check out her blog at The Hungry Teacher!! I promise you’ll love her 🙂 And be sure to stop by next Sunday for our last post of the series. There will be some giveaways to look forward to!!
