It's like today was a Monday! The students were very chatty throughout the day, and I constantly had to remind them to keep their attention to my lessons without side chatter. During specials, Dr. A (the principal) came into the classroom to meet with Mrs. Palmer. Of course the day I meet the principal is the day that I dressed more casual.... ugh!
During my math lesson the students all seemed to have the wrong answer for a certain problem... turns out I was the one who was wrong. Oops! There goes the idea of "the teacher is always right!" I read the story problem incorrectly so I got the wrong answer while going through it with the students. They ended up correcting me! During intervention time (WIN Time) the students break into small groups as a grade and get the individualized help they need. During this time, I led a read-aloud and comprehension activity on Cinderella with 4 students. For the most part they were very attentive and were paying attention. Yay! To end the day, I taught Social Studies. For today's lesson I taught about the beginning of North America. I tried to relate the lesson to the students by comparing their life to the colonist's and asking multiple students to engage in discussion. Social Studies can be a hard subject to make fun and interesting because it is very content based where the students just have to hear the information. I have to figure out how to make the lessons more interesting!
Overall my classroom management skills are getting better. I just hope with this increase in toughness that the students still like me and think that I can still be fun and goofy too. They just need to know when they need to listen and be attentive and when they can talk. It's a work in progress! After all, teaching is 80% management and 20% actually teaching curriculum... and I am definitely learning that!