This was one of the proudest activities I had the students do! I spent about 7 weeks teaching habitats to my students. The Arctic was the fourth habitat we completed in our classroom. I was trying to come up with creative ways to teach different adaptations, as the second-grade curriculum heavily focuses on how animals adapt to their environment. Each week I tried to come up with a new way to teach them about the habitats adaptions. It was challenging to try and come up with the most engaging way to teach this - and I think this was the best method I created! For the Artic, I assigned each group an animal. Then I created articles for each of the 6 groups. The students then had to work in their groups to read their articles and then write about their animal adaptations and draw a picture of their animal. Most of the science work we completed as a whole group, so this was the first assignment I had them do mainly on their own. I decided to include one of the best examples from each group in the slide show on the left. I ended up having the students come up to the document camera and share their work with each other so each group could learn about one of the other animals and I was so proud of their work!  Below I attached the articles I made and their groupings! Enjoy

One of the things I most enjoyed about student teaching was finding different ways to work with the students in groups. There were many times were I was able to have the whole class sit on the rug together or everyone sit at their seats. However, there were other times I was able to work with small groups in different parts of the room, doing different activities to switch things up from day to day. One of my favorite seating arrangements was having our small groups come to the rug where I would sit them and we would use the rug desks. Here, we could all sit in a circle and work on word sorts or activities together. I also liked when I was able to have students share their work using the doc cam and the students would sit on the rug and watch their peers share their hard work! Lastly, during my two weeks, I was the test for a new way to teach math to whole groups. In the second picture, you can see the students sitting on the rug working on their papers at their rug desks, while I was also able to teach them at the board. Overall, it was fun testing out different groups and seatings around the room, as these second-grade bodies are not made to be sitting at their desk all day!  

As mentioned earlier, during my two weeks, our school math coach decided to have me try a new way to teach math whole group. She came in to teach a lesson and realized that the class whole group was not working. So my SP, the coach, and I decided that we would split the class in half. Both groups would be receiving the same lesson but just in smaller groups. While I was teaching math, I was teaching different addition/subtraction strategies for two-digit word problems. Many of the students were struggling greatly with these strategies so I ended up slowing down our lessons and creating worksheets, or spending more time on single problems to focus on these strategies. By the end of my math teaching time, the majority of the students were able to complete problems using the strategies I taught them! This was so rewarding as many students were very defeated at the beginning of the unit, saying "This is too hard!" or "I just don't understand this". They grew so much in this unit! Here is some of their work, that I was so proud of! Below is a description of each picture.