Two weeks down

First two weeks are over, plenty of weeks to go. I lugged home some huge boxes of material this weekend so I can get started. There are some fun party events going on this weekend but I'm not sure where people are getting time to attend them... I work better when I work in small bits, so I'm taking the weekend to decompress mostly by myself, sleep, watch TV... that whole bit. And, of course, blog.

So I have a few kids who are a little bit troublesome. But I half blame myself for the difficulties I am having in controlling them. I haven't been able to do individual conferencing yet, or start helping my kids on an individual level, because I have to keep the whole class under control. Nobody knows what to do and they're awful at following directions on worksheets. Meanwhile I have to teach out of the textbook because I don't have anything else. I'm sure this is a fate that befalls many first-year teachers but I want to make things more exciting!

Even worse is the way things are working out for my lower-English students (especially the one who speaks zero English). She doesn't know what's going on during our discussions and it is a problem for her (and it would be for me, too!). I need to get her going on the Spanish reading program, which I just received at the end of last week. Hopefully I will be able to work out a plan where she can read by herself. I believe she is the only one in the class who will take the TAKS in Spanish. I have another kid or two whose English is very, very low, and for them I think I need to have them working with sight word flash cards to start off as well as getting lower-level readers so that they can better comprehend the stories they are reading.

All of them need a lot of extra practice. I am definitely not sure to begin where to talk about writing strategies. I am not sure what they can write. In our free writes, some of them can write a lot, some of them can't; it's a matter of vocabulary, I think. As much as my program director at TFA told me not to explicitly teach vocabulary, I'm going to start teaching spelling patterns and vocabulary explicitly next week because they need to recognize (1) sight words if they don't already and (2) patterns!!!!

So the schedule is going to get busier. This week we have a Wednesday open house instead of class in the afternoon. Thursday I have a training, and I won't be in class, which is really bad... I need to cover a lot of material on Wednesday (but they get out early) so I'll have to figure out how that is going to work....

More later, perhaps I can update on some of the ups and downs of the last couple weeks, but for now I'm captivated by the planning... :)