A Teachers Journey

Ladybugs! - Hennessy Elementary School          This was our last lesson at Hennessy Elementary School! The students had an assembly this day, so we had to work around that schedule. We started off the lesson with a quick question asking the students if they could be any bug, what would you pick and why? We had planned for them to afterwards do a little act out of the bug they chose, but due to their assembly we were asked not to do movement or brain break activities as we had limited time, and the assembly would be their time to wind down. Afterwards, we jumped right into doing our vocabulary for the day. We had slides and visual cards for they to follow along with. We had them clap out the syllables to each word per usual. The students were very riled up today, so we had a hard time getting them to fully focus. We told them that if we want to have time to do our craft towards the end, we need to get through all of our important activities first. This incentive...

 Agnes B. Elementary - Lesson 5!       When we first started our lesson, one of our students was missing as she was coming in late from a dentist appointment. For the first half of our lesson, we only had one child. This affected and changed our lesson a lot, but we had to be adaptable. We first started the lesson as we had planned with a little icebreaker. This was a small monster related activity connected to our first book. One person started off the sequence by making a monster movement of some sort (growl, claws, roar, etc). The next person had to repeat the first movement, adding their own afterwards. We went in a circle till everyone had a movement included and then did one with all of us together. We did this twice. Afterwards, we went over our vocabulary with our student. We had him clap out syllables and follow along with us via a slideshow and vocab cards. Vocabulary Words:  Letdown Scared Wobbly Personal      After reviewing vocab...

 Agnes B. Elementary School - Lesson 4!      We started off our lesson by asking the students how their Halloween went, since Halloween was last Friday. In our previous lesson, both students expressed that they do celebrate Halloween at home, so I knew that this was an appropriate question to ask. Both students went trick or treating; One student was a character from the new movie K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the other was Ghostface. They told us that they had a great time, got lots of candy, and even saw each other while trick-or-treating. After our brief conversation, we moved onto our icebreaker. Today, since our book was centered around music, we had them share their favorite genre of music and played an Instrument Charades game. For the charades, the students were asked to pretend they were playing an instrument while the rest of us tried to guess what instrument they had. After they took their turns, they asked us if we could go. Me and my co-teacher took our turns...

 Lesson 3! - Agnes B. Hennessy Elementary School We started off this lesson by going over the visual agenda for the day with them. We explained to them that today we would be reading a nonfiction book, which is different from the previous books we've read. After going over our agenda, we started off with our icebreaker activity called Role Model Charades. Since the book we were reading, A Justice for All , is about the first black female Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, we figured starting with role models was very fitting. We had the students act out a role model of theirs and the rest of us had to try and guess who they were. One student chose the singer Taylor Swift, and the other chose famous soccer player Christiano Ronaldo. After the kids took their turns, they asked us if we could go up and show our role models. My co-teacher also picked the singer Taylor swift, and I chose my Mémère. After we shared ours, we started settling down to begin our lesson for the day...

 Lesson 2! - Agnes B. Hennessy Elementary School      This was our second lesson at Hennessy Elementary School. We are in the same room with the same students, so we were already familiar with each other. We started off the lesson by recapping what we had learned the previous week to build off of that background knowledge. We asked them if they remember what we did, and they were able to tell us what the last lesson was. After discussing that for a few minutes, we went over our visual agenda on our slides linked under this article. Then, we started to explain what our next lesson would be on, Predictions! We introduced this concept by giving them an icebreaker activity called "GIF Predictions." On our visual slideshow, we had 4 slides, 1 example and 3 actual ones, that had different kinds of GIFs on it. GIFs are short loop videos that are usually 2-4 seconds or so long. In each of these videos, we had the students predict either what happened next in the video, or wh...