When I woke up this morning I was without a voice. At first, I contemplated whether or not I should immediatly call my CT, in case I got worse before I had to leave. But then I decided that after 3 hours I would probably be feeling better-plus I've been waiting to teach this lesson long enough!
When I got to the classroom the noise level was high, especially for publishing time. The students should have been sitting in their seats, writing a story based on the drawing that they first completed. Many students got excited that I was there and tried to read their stories to me-some from all the way across the room. While it's exciting that the students are so engaged in their stories, it's also disruptive to yell across the room. The first chance my CT had to say something to me she said, "I don't know what's wrong with them today. I can't do anything!" (in reference to their behavior level and loudness). What a great way to begin my first time teaching in front of this almost stranger!
After the kids came in from recess we sat down on the rug and I introduced my story to them, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs". I asked the students to listen as I read, because at the end I was going to ask them if they thought this was a real story, or a fake story.
As I was reading the story, which is quite funny, some students began repeating the name of the town (Chewandswallow). At first, I ignored it. But it quickly became a distraction and I had to stop and acknowledge the fact that it was a funny name. I then told the students that from this point forward they can say it one time-and then they need to let me continue with the rest of the story. That seemed to work :)
Once we finished the story and the students acknowledged that it was fake, we made a list of different types of weather that come down from the sky. Rain was quickly mentioned, along with snow. I had anticipated to hear sunshine, lightening, and hail-all of which eventually came out. One boy said "Crystals" which I immediately knew was a connection from my CT's lesson on clouds the previous week. I then used this as a seg-way into asking the children who else thought of another connection to something they already know.
Next my CT lead a demostration of the shelter drill during severe weather situations while at school. I had decided that this drill would be most beneficial for the students if the instructions came from my CT as she will be the one giving instructions to them if they ever have to do this drill again.
Once we returned from that we had a discussion about where information about severe weather comes from. The students decided that news about severe weather comes from 3 places; the TV, the Internet, or the radio. I guided the rest of our conversation about severe weather information as coming from the TV and talked about a weather man's job.
Discussing the job of a meteorologist smoothly led into my next activity, which involved using a concrete manipulative to stress the color of warnings/watches to the students. The object was a traffic light and we repeated "Stop, and seek shelter" for warnings and "Slow down, look around" for watches. The students were dismissed to their seats where they completed a worksheet that I made. On the worksheet student had to fill in missing letters of the sayings and color a traffic light.
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