Day 29: Substitute Teacher

November 3, 2015

Today my co-op was only at school for half the day. She left at 11 and I was going to be teaching the remainder of the day. I knew about this a few days in advance and I was excited the whole time leading up to it. So far I've just been doing Math Warm-Up daily and Social Studies. Today I got to teach Handwriting, Science, Math and do a read aloud for the class. I was surprised at how not nervous I was. I felt extremely confident going into the remainder of the day. Today was my 29th day in the classroom so I had 28 days of observing and helping out with the other subjects to know what I had to do.

The Handwriting and Math lessons were straight from their textbooks/teacher edition books. I created the Science lesson. My co-op received information a few weeks ago on a energy conservation poster contest. She asked me to get them started on this. I did a brief overview of what it means to save energy using a website a found that gave you a virtual tour of saving energy throughout your house. The class then went back to their desks to begin working on a rough draft of their posters which needed to display a way they can help save energy. This concept proved to be a little challenging for them. They were able to verbally talk about what they would do but they struggled when it came to representing that concept in picture form.

There was a substitute in the room with me the whole time I was there. She taught religion at the end of the day. It was interesting to see the class taught from a different person. Although the lesson was out of their books she put her own twist on it. The students were very engaged and did exceptionally well when answering review questions. The substitute asked them if they had any questions about what they learned about and a lot of the students had higher order thinking questions to ask. This really impressed me.

I really enjoyed getting to teach for half of the day today. It made me even more excited for student teaching to begin when I will be adding more and more subjects to my work load. Today was a great day!