The final week of my pre-internship year is now complete…AWE! Leaving my grade twos this afternoon was extremely difficult and a few tears were shed. This experience has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging as I near the end of my Teaching Degree. I could not be more grateful for the amazing school, Principal, and Co-operating Teacher that I was placed with. And I am especially grateful for the INCREDIBLE little learners that I was lucky enough to get to know as I we learnt from each other throughout my time in their classroom.
To wrap up our poetry unit, I planned a little Poetry Cafe so that my poets could present their poems to an audience! During the week we learnt about Limerick poems and what makes them special! The students learnt that limericks have a special rhyming pattern that goes AABBA. Together we explored many different limerick exemplars and made sure we understood the characteristics of a limerick before we tried writing our own!
Many of my grade twos are very strong writers so I made sure to use this opportunity to challenge them in an encouraged differentiation. I selected a large amount of students to write their limerick on a template that contained two stanzas. The rest of the class received a template on a different colored piece of paper that had one stanza. I challenged my own experience and resistance to differentiation with this task because I had yet to broaden my own perspective of how to effectively differentiate for my learners! I appreciated this experience because I quickly realized how important it is to be honest with your students about the decisions being made in the classroom. Many students noticed the difference in the templates, but did not feel discouraged because I reassured them that they are more than welcome to write a second stanza after they have completed their first – which some students did end up doing!
Before our Poetry Cafe we took the time to learn about what good speakers do and to practice presenting! When it came time to present we had an audience of our principal and the grade three class to listen to our poems! My poets did an AMAZING job and I was so happy to be able to celebrate our poetry unit together!
Until Internship,
Miss H.