Monday 11-30-15 Teaching a Prep Class

The first day of teaching I was very nervous. I wasn't nervous because of the content or the grade or anything like that, I think it was just because they were student's I had never met before and I didn't know how they would perceive me or respond to me. I also knew that this was a prep class and that all the student's had IEP's and I wasn't sure what levels or disabilities I would be presented with.

 

Once the students started to arrive and I was able to greet them and see faces, I started to feel much more at ease. As we started to teach the lesson, I could still see my partner was a little nervous so I tried to talk as much as possible and make sure our expectations were clear etc. The students enjoyed watching the commercial and most of them seemed excited about the overall assignment of script/persuasive writing. We showed them examples of a script and discussed aspects such as punctuation and format of a script. We also touched on purpose and audience so students would be thinking about why they were writing the script as well as who they were writing too. We then broke students up into groups of three and had one person from each group blindly reach into the bag and pick out a random toy to base their commercial on. Some students had a really hard time starting and thinking of a particular setting for their toy but once we started circulating the room and throwing out ideas for students, we could see it became much easier for them. With the exception of one group students did a great job of staying on task and working on their commercials/scripts for the remainder of the hour. Overall the first day went well and I felt the students really got a lot out of the day.