Starting Week 3

I am about to start week 3 for me at Swanson Primary School (week 5 of the final NZ term). During this week, I have may interesting school activities planned. On Tuesday November 11, New Zealand celebrates Armistice Day, which signifies the end of hostilities on the Western Front during WWI. The students and I will be walking to our local RSA (Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association) to represent Swanson Primary in a memorial celebration. Then on Thursday, the students have a previously planned field trip to the Motat (Auckland's Museum of Transportation and Technology). Also starting this week is an Algebra (Pre-Algebra in the States) tumble, where the students have been pre-tested and placed into general ability groups with a specific teacher. I have then taken the ability group for my cooperating teacher, and using the information from their pre-tests, I determined the gaps where the students will need instruction. I have started planning Focus Groups of students to hit specific learning objectives after a broader lesson in presented to the whole class. I have also started to really get deeper into my English technology lesson on Claymation, which combines narrative style in a visual form with elements of technology, specifically Windows Movie Maker. I have already been teaching parts of a narrative with the students and controlling the reading groups, of which two are doing book reports, and two groups are working on making connections between different texts in their school journals (short stories for younger readers). Next week I will be almost taking full control of teaching the students due to the Maths (mathematics abbreviation in NZ) rotation and the Arts rotation for the students of Koromiko. In the arts rotation, I am working on improv techniques with my groups of students. I have spent the first two classes with room 34 testing various improv games with the students I know best. Next week the classes will rotate so that the students will have a chance to experience different parts of the Arts (music, drama, painting, etc.). I am looking forward to all of the interesting experiences of this week, and I will post more on those experiences later in the week.