Senior Portfolio: 2013-14 

Paden Elementary Internship Journal

 

10/25/12

     This is the first day of my internship. I have received some books and basic lesson plans from Ms. Gill. I am supposed to create a lesson plan for the entire botany section and for the days that I am at Paden Elementary School. I am thinking that I'm going to have each day teach some different basic parts of a plant. Hopefully, by the end the students can plant their own plants.

11/1/12

     For the first day of me teaching a class, I had a small group of 4 students. I brought them out into the courtyard with some paper and some pencils and had them draw a diagram of a plant and label its basic parts, stem, leaves, etc. I explained the parts and told them about their uses.That took up about 20 or 30 minutes and after that I took them back to classroom. Ms. Gill had them present to the class about what they learned. Overall, I think this was a pretty good first day.

11/8/12

     I did almost the same thing that I did last week. I took the same small group out into the courtyard and did some more teaching. I had some new parts to talk about. They drew them and labeled them. Once that was over I took them back to the classroom. Ms. Gill wants me to do something a bit different next week.

11/15/12

     This week I did something a bit different. Instead of teaching to a small group of students I taught to the entire class. This was a very different experience. For the most part I could handle the small group. It was only 4 girls. The entire class was a very different beast. I taught my lesson but it could have gone more smoothly. I talked to Ms Gill afterwards and she has some ideas of what I can do differently next week.

11/22/12

     After what happened last week, I took Ms. Gill’s advice to heart and tried to follow it. I tried to make the lesson more active instead of me just talking, which would be fine for students in high school or college but not for 3rd graders. I gave all the students some paper and had them draw out the diagrams I had put on the board and for them to label the parts that talked about. This went a lot better and I think I am going to try and follow this from now on.

11/29/12

     This week went pretty normal. I went to Ms. Gill’s classroom and taught another class on different plant parts but I had to answer a lot more questions. These kids sure are inquisitive. Thank god for Ms. Gill there because I couldn't answer all the questions by myself. I was going over the reproductive aspects of a plant and one kid asked a question that I didn’t want to answer for a 3rd grader. Ms. Gill was able to answer the question in a way that kept it kid-friendly. Thank god for that.

12/6/12

     This week I went over some more interesting kinds of plants, ferns. I talked about how they are very different from other kinds of plants. For one they reproduce through pollen they have under their leaves. It is very different from other kinds of plants. The kids thought it was pretty cool.

11/13/12

     This week I tried something even more hands on. I tried to get the students to see a plant to sprout. Instead of sticking a seed in the ground and waiting, I tried a different approach. I gave the children their own seeds and they put them in a damp paper towel so they could watch the parts of a plant’s life that is underground. Once it sprouts, we are going to put it in the ground so it will grow. Hopefully this will work out.

12/20/12

     The experiment hasn’t worked yet. Ms. Gill had to make some adjustment to the experiment in order to make it work better. She put a spray bottle next to the seeds so the kids could water them without drowning them. So far they haven’t started sprouting but I am taking them back to my house for the break and hopefully they will sprout then. I think that we are going to plant them once school starts again.

1/10/13

     Well, the plants sprouted. They started over break and this class I took small groups of kids out into the yard so they could plant their sprouts. I am not sure what we will do after that. Do I have to water them or someone else? Do I revisit this? I am really not sure? I have to start coming on a different day because of scheduling conflicts so Ms. Gill wants me to now start helping with math. Hopefully that will be pretty easy.