"Dear Mr. President..." March 27th

With the constructive criticism that we got from P.Grimes last lesson, we decided to really kick it up a notch and push the understanding of the holidays a bit further with these bright kiddos. This lesson and the final visit (March 29th) together formed our summative assessment for this whole America the Beautiful unit. This idea of "writing a letter to the president in defense of the Fourth of July" (we pretended like the President wanted to cancel the patriotic holidays and my teammate (TT) and I had already defended Columbus Day and Presidents' Day) could not tap into Social studies in a better way - being active citizens who say something about things they want in their community, along with agreat connection to language arts and letter-writing (something we have seen them do during our observations) was a brilliant idea.

TT and I brought in a huge posterboard with an example letter for Presidents' Day, a rubric with the things we were looking for in their letters, and envelopes that would be helpful with students who finish early as an alternative activity with decoration and illustration, and we made sure to use this time at the beginning to review the holidays so that they would be able to refer back to the Independence Day information on the board for the writing of their own letter. We were looking for periods at the end of sentences, complete thoughts, some correct spelling (this was blurry), and three facts about the holiday itself that would help convince Mr. President of the holiday's importance.

A few things:
-Some of the students did a great job and were really on point. Some of the students I didn't expect to do as well as they actually ended up doing, with spelling, ideas, writing and finishing strongly. The idea of decorating the envelop once the letter is complete was a perfect differentiation idea. :)

-There is a wide range of writing abilities in a classroom like this one - students had varying degrees of final products. I kept thinking that this was the kind of thing you could spend DAYS doing - drafting, spell checking, illustrating, and teaching all aspects of the letter format with - but it was not necessarily a bad thing that we ended up doing it all in one visit. It was surely helpful to have the student teacher, Ms. D herself, as well as the two of us circling the room.

-Some of the students got lost in the shuffle - primarily Student J (ESL) and Student M (From Mexico, but not ESL identified). J got really upset and basically shut off during the assignment. I was not sure if it was because he had no feelings one way or the other about the holiday, if he didn't know about it, or if he was having a bad day in general. We tried to encourage him to write about another holiday from his country that he was really jazzed about, but in the end, he ended up with a blank page, and basically I felt as though this morning was a waste of his time.

-I was particularly upset about this because since I am getting ESOL certified, I felt like I dropped the ball in the fact that he "missed the boat" on this one, and realized how limited my understanding of ESL students (when mixed IN with the whole class) really is. HOMEWORK: read up on this! Student M (and a few other students who are not the best in literacy and writing) did an OK job, but were hurting for personal stories about Independence Day as well as facts and I feel could have just used even more time than we were able to give. Hopefully, for most of the students it went well...

-Again, TT and I definitely wanted our students to make the letter personal (since we included an example of a picnic at the Washington Monument in our letter) but were still trying to encourage students to steer from the "My grandpaw fought in this war" and more towards "we need to celebrate the US's birthday" moments.

Our Professor J.Pease was really helpful in her debriefing and observation this morning as well...

-We needed to work on our presence and professionalism a bit -"You guys" and our "we want to be friends with these kids" over being "their teachers" is always a balancing act. It is hard to be "visiting teachers" and to gain immediate respect and classroom management techniques with a room of 7 year olds. I feel like this is something you get better at, but the habits start now.

-We should have REALLY USED the visuals we brought in. J.Pease had the great idea of hilighting or underlining good things in the letter TT wrote so that students knew where his 3 facts were, how he used punctuation in the right way, and also how to make their letter top knotch. I guess when we were thinking through things we wanted to maximize our time for them to be actually writing, but more than anything, quality of quantity was of importance.

-I talked to her about my ESL moment of disappointment - and she recommended some great materials for me to use - I feel like I am great with Spanish speaking kids but can't do other languages, and I am great with ESL kids pulled out from class, but really need practical ideas for what do to when they are IN the class with the rest of the kids struggling to keep up or to know what we are doing (i.e. Student J).

-We also go to talk about things we will be going over for the rest of the semester that most of our fellow students are concerned with as well (differentiation, classroom management, assessment, etc) and I'm excited to get my hands on more stuff :)