Senior Portfolio: 2013-14 

Cailean Demmon

May 27th, 2014

Paden Elementary School Internship

     My yearlong internship at Paden Elementary School has been quite the experience. I interned there from October 2012 to May 2013. For the first half of the internship I was creating and enacting my own lesson plans on botany; and for the second half I was helping Ms. Gill, my supervisor, by helping her students in math.

     From this experience, I have learned that kids, especially young 3rd graders, need an aspect of hands on learning in order to take the most from it. When I started teaching my lessons, I tried to be very word-based. I was going through a presentation for the kids. It could’ve been better. Some of the students were fine and could sit down for the 30 minutes; but some of the other students didn’t have the attention span for it. Ms. Gill told me that I would have to make adjustments and get the students to do something with their hands. We talked about it and the idea was brought up that they should take down notes. The notes would, basically, just be the diagrams of the plant parts and some labels. I tried this out the week after and it worked a lot better. More of the students listened to me and could pay attention. Some wouldn’t, of course, but that student had trouble pay attention to Ms. Gill.

     The lesson plans for the botany aspect of my internship worked in either two ways, a small group of 4 or 5 people, or the entire class. I usually knew which one I was gonna do before the day of. The lesson plan usually didn’t change depending on which size of group I was doing. But by the end, I was just doing the full classes.

     The math part of my internship started sometime after New Year’s. Ms. Gill would teach some math part and I would help any student who was having trouble. I really tried to make sure that it was the student who would figure out how to fix his or her mistake. I would tell them the mistake and where the mistake was but they would have to figure out how to fix it. Sometimes this was really quick and easy and sometimes it would take quite a bit longer. It was really satisfying to know that you helped someone learn something.

     I feel that by the end of the internship, I understood more of the teaching experience. I understood more of what it meant to be a teacher, since that is what I basically was. I worked on my presentation, lesson building, and class controlling skills in the first half; in the second half, I worked more on my one-on-one teaching skills. By the end of the internship, I had a better grasp on these skills and could perform them better. But at the beginning, I had no idea what I was going to get myself into. For one, I had expected that I would’ve been done much sooner and that I wouldn’t have helped out with math. But I feel that it all worked out in the end and I had a very good experience at Paden Elementary School.