Miss Roetemeyer's Education Journey

I have discussed my poetry unit in my previous blogs. However, I will give a quick explanation again. In my Teaching Language Arts class, we are to create a unit. I chose to do my unit over poetry for the 3rd-grade level. In our units, we need to have a book list that we plan on using to help our students understand the content in our unit. Here is my book list for the poetry unit:

In my college class, we are learning about different types of learning strategies we can use in our future classrooms. One of the strategies we have recently learned about is called a Sketch to Stretch. The Sketch to Stretch is a strategy to help the students break down concepts in the classroom by using different methods of learning, such as pictures and note-taking. This strategy can be used in several different ways.  I have created a sketch to stretch to show you have this method of learning can be used. In my example, I broke down who the character is, character traits, and the morale of the story. I used the picture book "Rainbow Fish". If you are unaware of this children's book, here is a video of it being read aloud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cmddZh6t8 . In my Sketch to Stretch, you can see how I broke the concepts down into each row. I wrote a little note about it and drew a picture to represent the concept. This week in my class, a couple more students pr...

This past Wednesday for one of my college classes, each student in the class presented one lesson from their unit. We all are required to write a lesson plan for our grade and topic of choice. I loved being able to hear all of my peer's lessons because it shows how different teachers can teach from one another. I loved being able to look at lessons from other perspectives because it gives me other ideas of what I can do in my next lessons.  The first present that was able to present her lesson was Deni. Deni's lesson was to help students learn to summarize stories by sequencing events. One thing in particular that I really liked in her lesson was her hook. I think having a strong hook is important because this can set the whole mood for the lesson. Her hook involved showing the students a short trailer to the book they were going to read in class that day. To me, this sounds like an activity that will get the students excited to read and will help them become more engaged. The ...

As I continue my education journey to become a teacher, I am making a unit plan for a 3rd-grade language arts class. For the unit, my lessons revolve around different forms of poetry. One of the books that is planned to be used in the lessons is "Ode to a Commode" by Brian P. Cleary. This book has many different poems, that follow the Concrete poem structure. Concrete poems are written about something in particular and are usually shaped like the topic choice. In the lesson plan, the teacher is to read a few of these poems out loud to the class. After reading a couple of the poems, the students will participate in a grand conversation.  During the grand conversation, the students can and will discuss several different things. The teacher's job is to guide the grand conversation and to allow the students to run the majority of it. I have always been told that during grand conversations, the teacher's role is to be the mediator. Therefore, the teacher is the person to h...

In the future, I hope to become a 2nd-grade teacher. I have always loved the littles and have found that I like to work with that grade level. Understanding new vocabulary terms is a fundamental skill to increase their reading skills. When word walls are included in the classroom, is a great resource for the students to refer to when they are struggling to find or spell a word. Due to this being a big resource, I believe as the teacher you should place the word wall in a central location in the classroom, that all students can easily see. I also think it is important to teach the students how to properly use the word wall and to introduce new words throughout the entire school year. In the second-grade, word walls are mostly sight words. These words are words they need to understand when they see them at sight. Second-grade words are the fundamental and building words of common reading.  When you look up second-grade word lists, you will see a combination of many different words. S...

  I am currently in a class in which we are learning about Elementary and Middle school language arts. In our textbook, there is an excerpt about a 4th-grade teacher, who teaches her class the importance of flexibility. Mrs. McNamara teaches her class what flexibility is by pointing it out in her own classroom and in the school. She explains to her class what it means to take risks and sometimes you have to take those risks to learn from them and understand what is better for you. The school switched up the lunch menu for the day and Mrs. McNamara's class was caught off guard by it, but they had to adapt and become flexible to eating something different for the day. To me, Mrs. McNamara is a teacher that is very understanding of her students and is the person to help them learn not only academically but from real-life situations as well. I would love to become this teacher in the future to help shape my students' lives and be that teacher they remember forever. These students a...