1. On Monday, they started off with a new week of spelling words. The first groups spelling words were the sounds “e” and “eh” using long and short e sounds. Some of their words were: bed, dead, sweet, meat. The second groups spelling words were words that you change the y ending to -s,- ies or -ing. One of their examples was cry which was changed to crying, cries and cried. Then Mrs. Whisnant did a read aloud of the story Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving to the whole class. They made predictions as they went along. Then each group did a word sort in their homework notebooks with the weeks spelling words. The lower level reading group first did a picture walk of Mina’s Day individually, then Mrs. Whisnant read it aloud and students wrote a story about their days. On Wednesday, the lower level group of readers went through Mina’s Day again and got in partners. Each person read a page out loud to their partner and they read the entire book three times. Mrs. Whisnant also did a read aloud for A Turkey for Thanksgiving. Before each page, she would have students raise their hands and make predictions on what was going to happen.
2. On Monday, Ashley and I gave two students who were absent the first day the spelling test. On Wednesday, we helped a student work on her writing the spelling words three times, making predictions on a book she was reading, and finishing her math worksheet and grammar worksheet. I also helped a student finish her word sort with her spelling words. Then, one of the students read a book about Cheetahs to me.
3. To this point, I have not seen a social studies or science lesson in the classroom. There have been days when reading books, different countries are mentioned and students briefly review them, but other than that, no social studies. There was one day when they listened to a song about solids, liquid and gasses, but again, that is all the science I have seen. Reading and math take up a majority of their day, along with different pull out things like P.E, Art and Library time.
4. I think it will be very hard for me to just teach reading and math when I know how important knowing science and social studies is. Even if it is just a few minutes a day, I feel like I will be doing a short science/social studies lesson when I become a teacher.
It is interesting to hear you say that there hasn’t been any science or social studies curriculum taught in the classroom you are in. Amanda said the same thing and the more I think about it, I don’t think there has been any science or social studies taught in the classroom I am in either. I know there was a mini history lesson this past week because of Thanksgiving, but I have never seen a science lesson done. I wonder if it is taught in higher levels? Surely it is, it would have to be.