Week 4

This week I am feeling more comfortable with the routines in the classroom. I am able to take over more and am helping the teacher with planning reading material and she is letting me pick which books would be good for the kids for the next few weeks. The staff in the classroom are amazing and know the routine so well as well as the students. I am very lucky to have such and amazing staff to work with. They make sure the students are always on task and follow through will all of the necessary plans for the students.The BIPs are being used a lot daily for the students. I am still taking over the Calendar group of the classroom as well as the morning and afternoon group with the students. This Monday coming up I will be fully taking over the classroom and I feel prepared and overwhelmed still as well. There were a few challenges this week that I went through. The biggest challenge this week was not having enough staff in the classroom that we need. It made it extremely hard to give the necessary attention to small details when we were down so many stand in the room. This is where I am learning how to deal with that as well as collaborate and speak with administration about how to handle the situation. It also gave me insight on how to ask other staff for assistance. We were having a hard time finding staff to relieve our paras and allowing the students to go outside for recess. In order to solve this we spoke to administration as well as the specials teachers to ask for help with our students outside. A situation that I encountered was working through the smart board calendar group with the students. A particular student has been having a hard time at the smart board and has been acting too silly while up there. I came up with the idea of making him a superhero book (since it is his motivator) that he can work for after her appropriately gets through his work on the smart board. 

      I am continuing to learn a lot from my cooperating teacher especially right now since we are doing a lot of testing as well as preparing for IEP meetings and re-evals. The most important thing that I have learned is that consistency is key with the students in the classroom. I have been working one on one with them on their IEP goals and felt like there was not much progress happening, but when we tallied the percentages up it was amazing to see how much progress has been made since the baseline week. 

      I hope to learn more about running the classroom and thinking quick on my feet when something is not working for the students. I am helping with a lot of the testing for the students IEP that I am attending in October. This is helping me learn a lot about assessment and how to administer them. We also began cooking with the students and this week we are making pancakes so it was a lot of fun to learn how to cook with them. This coming week I will try and introduce some new food so that the students will: 

1B.1a. Identify one’s likes and dislikes, needs and wants, strengths and challenges.