Student Teaching Week 12

This was my first week with leading instruction with the fifth-grade classes. At first, I was not used to teaching elementary students. The audience is totally different and you have to go about how you communicate lessons very simply. My goal this week was to teach in Carl Orff's style of elementary education. The Orffian method is to start kids off with body percussion and singing, then transfers those rhythms and melodies to recorders and percussion and the students perform it. The one thing I was not used to was incorporating movement into the lessons. There are often games and dances utilized in the lesson plans. At first, I was having trouble with it because there are so many steps in each lesson. If you miss one, you have not executed the lesson properly and there is not a lot of time so you have to make sure you are not spending too much or too little time on one thing. By the end of the week, I was teaching the lessons very smoothly. One hurdle I had to come over was because there are so many steps, my classroom management lacked. Kids were talking and the cooperating teacher had to correct the class at times. That was due to mainly thinking about what I was going to say or do next. The classes are only a half-hour long and it flys by and I am trying to utilize the time. So next week I want to focus more on managing the class and stop and correct them when I need to.

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