Reflection 10

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

REFLECTION #10 October 20-24, 2014 This is my 10th reflection and October is almost ending which means November is almost here and practice is almost, aaaalmost over. Just six weeks more to go! On the other note, my students absolutely misbehaved this week. My case study student who was starting to behave better was out of control this week! Thankfully, his mom came by the school on Wednesday and I had a meeting with her. She updated me on the fact that her son has not been having his medicine because of a problem they had and he wasn’t going to have it until Saturday. This meant that the student’s behavior was going to be very wild. When she told me this I felt that everything fell into place. Now I had the answer for his attitude this week.

I’ve been having other misbehaving conduct in my classroom, mainly from the male students. They have not been bringing their notebooks, and this was alarming to me because since last week I gave them homework so they could study for the test and these students’ notebooks has been missing for way too long. I actually believed them when they said teacher I left it at home, and I didn’t have access to their book bags because they leave it in their homeroom class. I have had this problem now with three different students. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I had to call these students mothers because I could not write them a letter. Behold, one of the mothers confronted their child, which told me he did not have a notebook, and there it was, in his book bag. She checked his notebook and confirmed that there was nothing written that day. I’m glad that now the student is bringing his notebook and I stapled all the work he did not have in it.

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

On Monday I taught about the vocabulary words my students have been practicing since two weeks ago. I had a worksheet ready for them to do, but first, we discussed an exercise I had given them the prior week. It was three cloze sentences with three vocabulary words to choose from. I made the exercise look as it was coming out from the morning message envelope and I taped the envelope on the board. I had three volunteers and the students were participating very well. When the students had doubts on a specific vocabulary word, I told them to look at the word wall for the Spanish definition. After the exercise was completed, I gave them the handout I made of a matching exercise of six vocabulary words and in the second part they had to draw four vocabulary words. While I checked the notebooks I saw that a lot of the students dominated this part very well.

At least this week I was able to cover many things such as family trees, fact and opinion and phonetic sounds: /kw/ and /skw/, one topic per day. For family tree I used the story’s characters as examples and gave them a worksheet as homework and for fact and opinion I brought my students a power point with examples from the story and also gave them a worksheet hand out to classify as fact or opinion. I also gave them a test review sheet with the answers and made sure EVERYBODY had one to study for the test next week. The review was for Friday but that day was the day parents came to pick up their students grade. I was not able to speak with any parent because they go the homeroom teacher to pick up the grades and if they wanted to speak to the English teacher they would come to the classroom but nobody did. My students did not do badly in the test I gave but the downside was that nobody hands in their homework and that was the thing that was affecting their grade. The homeroom teacher said they were the same way with her.

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

I do not know the situations at my student’s houses, but I do see when a student has a responsible parent because their assignments are always done. I do not want to omit those students that may not have the backup and the support they need from their parents and I do not want them to do badly in the class. Therefore, for further occasions, and starting next week, I will continue to give homework, but I will count that as a whole grade and not as individual. I am going to do more classroom focused works for grades and in that way I can make sure that everyone hands the assignment.