Release Time-Day Two

Today, I again released Ms. Tate, a third grade teacher. This time, I had even more fun with the class. The students are great and the environment makes anyone feel welcome. I had the opportunity to see how the routine is different at a different time. Although the morning seemed like it was going to be long and take forever, it flew by!

In this third grade classroom, I had the opportunity to teach Math, Science, and English. The activities that I did were relating to review in Math and Science. But I was able to share some of my own personal strategies with some of the students that were struggling, with Math and multiplication facts, as well as tricks to learning and remembering new vocabulary terms, which was really neat.

Then, before lunch, I had the students ready and lined up early so I decided to have each of the students tell me something that they learned or something fun that they did today. My favorite thing was that several of the students were really excited to say that they learned the little tricks or strategies from me. This makes me feel really excited! Also, I think that this is something that I like doing just to see if the students were paying attention and can recall information that they learned throughout the morning.

Release Time-Day One

As I approach my second day of release time, I am very excited, especially to be releasing the same teacher again! During my first day of release time, I was placed with Angie Tate at North Elementary. She is a third grade teacher. I really liked the way that she had her classroom set up. She has her students placed in groups of four to five students/desks. I believe that she does this to have a large open area and mat for oral reading time.

My favorite thing about her classroom and teaching strategies was that of her routine for stations. For each student, there is a folder that travels with them to each station. I find this to be very nice for tracking students' work without having to collect it everyday and have mounds of paperwork. Also, I believe that she uses this system to keep track of which stations various groups have been to during the week and which ones that they need to go to in the event that there would be any confusion.

Lastly, I really liked the system that Mrs. Tate used for the station rotation. She has note cards with all of the students' names on a card and then a magnet is glued to the back. She groups the students together and sticks the magnets on the board writing that group's rotation next to it. She does this for each group. Also, in the groups, she uses a post-it to symbolize who will be the group leader for the day's stations.

I really like this teaching strategy for reading and language arts instruction relating to ability levels. This is something that I would look into using and molding into my own system in my future classroom.