Week 5:
Torbay Primary School

December 16, 2013

I cannot believe that it is nearing the last week of my student teaching experience. This week everything has begun to wind down, which feels strange since it is December, but in New Zealand their summer break begins in mid December. I’ve continued teaching my small group, we’ve expanded the number line hope to include counting down from twenty. The students have also started working on identifying words that rhyme. We use the Treasure Chest of Junk at the beginning of each lesson to give them lots of practice with rhyming words and by the end of the week they could all write a sentence that rhymed. This helped them demonstrate their handwriting growth as well as their understanding of rhyme.

One of my favorite teaching moments from this week happened unexpectedly (as I’ve heard the best learning opportunities often do). We had just finished playing the number line hop game and were getting ready to walk down the outdoor corridor to go to our usual space in the library for handwriting practice. One of the students looked at the number line we had just finished hopping on and said, “I wish we could make a number line all the way to library”. And suddenly there was an eruption of excitement in my small group as they all thought about the possibility of hopping down a massive number line. While the thirty minutes of group time wasn’t long enough to actually create such a large number line the idea had me excited as well. Another one of the students’ learning objectives is to learn to count up by ones and I saw this as a simple opportunity to help them continue to achieve that.

I suggested that rather than drawing a number line all the way to the library we should count our steps and see how many it would take us to get there. This seemingly simple idea had all of my students wriggling with excitement and whispering numbers to themselves all the way to the library. It was by far the most productive, and quietest walk we have had yet. This moment really stuck out to me because it reminded me to apply one of the most important lessons I learned from my teaching classes at Cornell, to seek out teaching moments everywhere. As a teacher it is so meaningful to listen to students’ ideas and show enthusiasm for every lesson I’m teaching so that even something as simple as counting your steps can become a learning moment.