First Day at Summerville Elementary

I had a wonderful first day at Summerville Elementary. My lead teacher has so much teaching experience and she has the most amazing classroom management skills. It is such a diverse and interesting class but so far, all of the students seem so great and eager to learn. My co-operating teacher almost immediately introduced herself and her assistant and then so perfectly explained to the class that we would be observing on Thursdays as we were learning how to be teachers just like her and the students seemed to love the explanation. I think the children are very excited to have us in the classroom and I can tell already it is nice for our co-operating teacher to have a few extra sets of hands. We were able to observe the students during a writing lesson which was very neat, as well as during their math centers. I am so excited about this semester in that we will not be teaching just a lesson, that we will be actually taking over the class for a certian amount of time. I think that this makes more sense as it is so much more realisitc of teaching, I am very excited about this.

In class this week I really enjoyed reading a lot about the cases in our book. I particularly loved the two cases that talked about parent teacher relationships as I think that this is one of the scariest parts about being a teacher, building a positive relationship with our parents. I learned a lot more about communicating with the parents, keeping them as informed as possible, and most importantly remembering that as teachers it is our job to keep the parents updated and inform them of any problems. I think it is difficult to remember that it is the teachers job to initiate the communication which I think can be difficult at times. I am excited to learn more techniques for communicating with the parents as I know how difficult this can be.