My name is Eva Ticknor and I am a senior Early Childhood Education major at Illinois State University. I grew up in Crystal Lake Illinois and decided to attend ISU because I knew it had a well-respected College of Education. Initially, I thought that I wanted to teach preschool or kindergarten-aged children. But throughout my clinical and personal experiences, I have come to realize that I enjoy working with second and third graders. This is my last semester at ISU before student teaching and I am looking forward to learning all that I can before I leave! This blog will follow my thoughts about this semester as I participate in my clinical setting of a kindergarten classroom.
As I am in my clinical setting this semester there are four goals I have set for myself to achieve by the end of the semester. My first goal is to improve on building professional relationships in my clinical setting. Last semester, I felt as though my cooperating clinical teacher and I did not have much of a connection. I want to get to know my cooperating teacher better this semester so that I can feel more comfortable talking with her about her students, her coworkers, and teaching in general. I know how important it is to have an open path of communication with coworkers and I hope to begin practicing forming relationships like this by working on my relationship with my cooperating teacher.
Another goal that I have for this semester is to become more comfortable with teaching science and social studies to children. I feel like I have had plenty of opportunities to teach reading and writing lessons but I have not had much experience with these other subjects. I know that through the classes I am taking this semester I will learn strategies for teaching science and social studies in fun and effective ways.
The third goal I have made for myself is that I want to integrate relevant technology into my lessons. Last semester I worked on becoming more comfortable with using Smart boards and now I want to continue to expand my knowledge. There are so many websites and resources for teachers to incorporate into their lessons in order to make them more engaging, visually stimulating, and interactive for students. I want to explore some of these resources this semester and make sure that my lessons are fun and involve relevant technology in an effective way.
My last goal for this semester is to work on my classroom management skills. Classroom management is something that I find to be tricky and somewhat uncomfortable at times. I work in a school over the summer, and I find that I have an easier time with classroom management when I personally know the students. I think that this is some of the reason why I find it difficult in a clinical setting. Some things that I plan on doing in order to improve my classroom management skills are that I am going to make sure to tell student my expectations, have an attention grabber to use throughout my lessons, and make my activities engaging.
Here is a quote that I love and reminds me how important it is to make learning
fun and interactive for kids!
