Last Week

I can't believe our field experience for Block 1 is over! These last five weeks went by very quickly and were filled with a variety of activities. My partner was sick the last three days of field experience, so it was unfortunate we were not able to end the journey together. Since she was not there, I led the Daily 5 small group rotation by myself. This week, my CT wanted me to work on similes with the students. She was going to teach a large group lesson as well. However, the day she was going to do that, there ended up not being time, so when it came time for them to take the test, the information had only been covered by my instruction. I looked at the test questions, and I saw that 8 of the 21 questions dealt with similes! That was quite a surprise. I was a little nervous and excited to see how they would do, because that would reflect my teaching. I looked through the test results once they were finished, and overall I was satisfied with the results. I wish I saw the test questions before I taught the lesson so I could have better prepared them for what they would see on the test, but I believe my activities definitely helped. One thing that did puzzle me about the test was that it did not ask any questions about common and proper nouns, which is another topic I taught for multiple days. I pointed this out to my CT, and she was also surprised to see that. This is the first year using this curriculum, so she is still getting used to it. She said that last year's curriculum covered it all, so I'm confused why this is not the case with the newer curriculum.