Reflecting on Educ 490: Practicum #2

Yay! We made it through our second practicum! Looking back at this practicum it feels like it went by quicker than our first three-week practicum. For my practicum, this time around I was with a group of grade ones with a fabulous CT who has had a ton of experience. Just to give you a sense of my learners, my class was diverse as it not only reflected students on different stages of the developmental curve but also some with specific learning challenges such as anxiety. My class also was heavily affected by this covid year we have had with some students returning to school only two weeks before I began teaching. Connecting to this our classroom also had a covid exposure during my time there so at one point I was down half a class due to students and families self-isolating. Our principal also was on leave during this time, leaving my CT as the “Teacher in Charge” for just over a week of my time there. Overall, there was a lot going on in this practicum school-wise, and classroom dynamic wise but I am very thankful for this experience because it was very real. I say real in the sense that there was no hiding from certain challenges, there was just what we had to do which I enjoyed. When it came to my students each and every one of them was awesome to work with as well, and I learned something different from each of them during this process.

This time around I felt like my strengths really showed in creating connections with the students as well as trying to make lessons as engaging as I could. This was definitely a much-needed strength during this time due to the fact that it is Ma-June (May-June) as my CT called it. Considering the school year was coming to a close soon and the weather was warming up, finding things to do that the students were excited about was crucial to keeping my learners engaged. Connecting to this, a stretch I definitely had this time was classroom management. My first practicum class in February I had no issues with but as I said it was Ma-June so I definitely think the time of year affected this. My CT also had a very commanding voice, which she called her “mom voice” that the students were used to hearing. For myself though, I can use my voice but I do not find it works for me as well so I really had to come up with strategies to get the student’s attention. Some of these strategies included clapping and asking the students to tell me how many fingers I was holding so that they had to stop and look at me. Another piece that I did not really think was vital to classroom management before was movement breaks. Movement breaks saved my life. I had noticed in some of my early lessons I would try to rush through the instruction piece so that the students could get up after I was finished but I realised this was not a good practice. I realised this quickly because if the students were already struggling at the beginning of whatever instructions I was giving them if I were to just try and make it through it then the students are already not set up for good understanding. So, I learned that it is okay to stop everything and take a moment to wiggle or breath or whatever it may be. This change was important for me because I was so worried about sticking to time and plans that It did not occur to me that taking a minute to stop and recentre could be all it takes to move a lesson from okay to great. Once I implemented this change things were much better.

I honestly loved spending time with these students and they showed me so much resilience and joy. I have lots of great memories from this class but I think one of my favourites was doing a beginning-middle-end lesson with the students on story structure. We had previously just watched an interesting video during snack on volcanoes. So, some of my students applied what they had learned during this video to our story structure and we created a story about Teapot mountain erupting with tea during our discussion. It was cute and funny and I loved how the students came up with the ideas for the story. Overall, I really enjoyed this practicum and I learned a lot from it. I feel like moving forward I would like to do some older grades to see how I handle that. I already miss this group of students but I am super excited to see what lies ahead.