Student Teacher Advice

Dear Student Teacher,

I’ve been exactly where you are. I can still remember walking into my first placement on the first day and feeling overwhelmed and excited at the same time. I was fortunate enough to have a positive experience in both of my student teaching placements. The following advice is for you in hopes that it will make your experiences positive as well. 

Be On Time

You should be at school every morning (even before your cooperating teacher arrives). Your promptness and attendance paints a picture of how you will be in the future. Your mentor teacher will notice; other teachers, the principal, secretary, custodian, and/or upper administration will notice as well. It is better to show up sick and let them send you home then to call in even one day! Always try to show that you are willing to go the extra mile even if you aren’t feeling 100%. Don’t let a diagnosis or label be an excuse for not giving your all. There are more eyes on you than you might think. Show them your very best.

Be Present

Put your phone away and ask to be involved in everything. Your review depends on more than the lessons you teach. Talk to the students; ask them about their interests. Try and help a struggling kid or just be an obvious positive presence in the classroom. If you notice misbehavior- speak up! The students will view you as an authority figure. That mindset will be a benefit during your placement. Ask to go to extra meetings, attend after school events, or volunteer for a school wide event. Seek out ways to participate in your placement other than in the classroom.

Take Notes

You will learn more in the next few weeks than the entirety of your schooling to get you here. Now is when your “feet are to the fire”. Take advantage. Take notes, a lot of notes. Journal everyday about what you see, what you do, and all the positives and negatives of the experience. You will look at your notes again and they will hopefully bring you inspiration. Grab extra copies of lessons, worksheets, assessments. They will provide support for you in the future when you are recreating the wheel in your own classroom. If possible, set up a cloud based drive and “dump” as much as you can into it. The drive will become a home base for everything you experience. In my day, I had a copy paper box. I’m thrilled that technology has evolved to make your experience easier. Take advantage of the tech!

Ask Questions

Your mentor teacher and supervisor are there to help you learn through doing. Ask a question before you get into a situation where you are being observed or make a mistake. All the things you do in your student teaching should be learning experiences. Asking questions ahead of time can hopefully help lessen the painful experiences. There aren’t any stupid questions. There is a lot of educational jargon and acronyms. If your teacher (or another) says something you don’t understand, ask for clarification. It’s better to get it clarified than to waste your brain energy trying to decipher what what said.

Student Teaching is a Job

Consider your student teaching to be a real job! Even though you are not getting paid for your student teaching, you should take it just as seriously. Take it all in and be as professional as you have ever been. Make sure your paying jobs and social life don’t interfere with your student teaching experience. This experience will be approximately 5 months of your life. How you conduct yourself during those 5 months can have lifelong consequences; do everything in your power to ensure the consequences are positive. Your hard work will pay off later.

Now is the time! Take advantage of every opportunity to spread your wings! Learn from your experience and someday you can have your own student teacher read this letter, too.

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Fun with Math in an Elementary Classroom

For some us, math isn’t the most exciting subject to teach. I have never been able to get excited about algorithms and numbers the way some of my coworkers do.

If your math instruction isn’t what you want it to be, sometimes you just need to put a little of yourself into the instruction to make it come alive. Many districts dictate exactly what program or lessons must be used. But why not try to incorporate some fun into your daily math routine? Break your whole group instruction into small group rotations and provide more opportunities for fun practice. It will help you and your students love math just a little bit more!

Here are 6 ways you can liven up your math instruction...

Number Talks

If you are looking to strengthen your students’ mental computation while simultaneously improving their mathematical reasoning, Number Talks are perfect! These 5-10 minute chats can be done whole group or with small groups. The best part of Number Talks is that the students drive the direction of the talk. As the teacher you design the skill or idea that will be the focus of the Number Talk. For example: subtraction across zeros, double-digit addition, etc. But based on the abilities and the interests of the students, these talks will differentiate themselves! Number Talks can be a way to introduce, practice, or review a concept. Most importantly these chats get your students looking at numbers differently and making connections beyond what the text book can do!

This 15-minute video explains Number Talks and gives excellent examples:

Stanford Number Talk Video

Fluency Sprints

When students have automaticity of math facts the students can work with more ease when applying the skills. Focusing on math fact mastery only takes a few minutes a day to make a big difference. Students can work on fluency with worksheets, computer games, timed tasks, or basic flash card practice. Is anyone having flashbacks to playing Around the World in elementary school? Any math lesson can take a few minutes of fact practice to build up those foundational skills. Giving an inventory test will give you the information needed to be able to differentiate the practice that is needed. Using less than 5 minutes of instruction to hone in on fluency will have long-term impacts on your overall math instruction.

Fluency Challenges

Each year we create a challenge to motivate the students to master their multiplication facts. We begin testing the 0, 1, and 2’s. Once the students master those, we have a pattern that we follow that seems to be helpful in their ability to master all the facts up to 12s. Every few days we re-inventory the progress so each student can test their mastery wherever they are in the sequence. This is a great job for a parent volunteer to do when they come in to help. We give the students goals and deadlines. Students who master all 12 earn a dance party celebration. For the kids that don’t quite make it we have a fact practice party in the classroom while the others are dancing in another room. We make sure to celebrate all student success.

You can find a complete system for learning the multiplication facts here:

Fourth and Fritcher Multiplication Superhero Challenge

Student Reward Tags Hanging Proudly on Display

Interactive Notebooks

Any skill can be broken down in order to be introduced or practiced using an interactive notebook page. It is a fun way to bring in some cutting, pasting, and colored paper into the equation. I have the students bring in composition notebooks at the beginning of the year so we can use them when I want to add an interactive element to my instruction. If you aren’t comfortable committing to a whole notebook, interactive pieces can be glued onto a piece of construction paper that the students take home at the end of the lesson. Additionally, these tasks can become a bulletin board that will brighten the room and provide a reference for learning.

Digital Fun

Our students love to play games on their iPads and Chromebooks. Many of the games infuse math practice and imaginative game play to motivate.

The popular site in my class right now is Prodigy. You can find it here: https://www.prodigygame.com/ They would play all day if we let them. But it has a nice sampling of skills that they need to work through in order to master the levels of the game.

A great app to work on fluency is Flash to Pass. There are different levels and a timer to help students track their own progress with particular facts or operations. I oftentimes recommend this app for parents who are looking for ideas to support their child at home. Available for iPad/iPhone only: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashtopass-free-math-flash-cards/id330482882

Task Cards

I love putting task cards into my math instruction. When students feel like they are playing a game the work isn’t so painful! Students can complete the cards independently or in pairs. Most of my task cards have a work space sheet so answers can be checked for accuracy and accountability. These cards get the students out of their seats and working with others on the skills that need to be practiced. Task cards work well in a center or can be placed around the room to play a game of Scoot.

You can find task cards for every standard here:

Fourth and Fritcher Task Cards

Math can be a subject that many students and teachers shy away from. With a little bit of tweaking and some adjustments in your plans, practice and lessons can be fun and engaging. It’s a win-win for everyone!

New Year Classroom Ideas

Once you come back from the holidays there are many new mindsets that are in place. Everyone is on the resolution bandwagon and are trying to do their best. With all of those new goals, why not make your classroom reflect some of your new inspirations?

New Seating Arrangements

If you have assigned seats this is a great time to have the students come back to new places to sit. This will help break old behavior habits that were evident before the holidays. Unless there are behaviors, my students choose their own seats each day and oftentimes do not sit in the same places. But giving your classroom direction and structure with seating can provide security for those students who struggle with choosing a seat each day.

Partner Choice

A fun activity that can be done is choosing time or season partners. I provide the students with a graphic organizer that allows them to choose 4 different working partners that are their “go to” partners. It will require a bit of pre-planning, but helps speed up the process of pairing students up later on. If you are using a clock organizer, students will choose a partnership for the 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 spots. The season organizer runs the same way. These organizers can be stored in their folders or mailboxes for easy reference. This gives a fun way to get different kids working together and it's a novel way to organize them. You can always pick sticks for random groupings, but partner charts makes them feel like they have a choice in the decision making.

Read about CLOCK PARTNERS in this post from Sunny Days From Second Grade.

Flexible Seating Options

It seems like most of the beginning of the year the students are getting used to the classroom norms and expectations of the different seats available. This year, I had a group that had a hard time controlling themselves on the yoga ball seats, so I have limited the number available to the students this year. As one of our classroom goals is to have more self control, I am going to bring out some other floor seats and mats to incorporate more options for them to sit on. This will make coming back to school a little more inviting!

Rearrange Furniture

Making new areas in your classroom. Provide new nooks for reading, learning, group work, etc. I love making the room look just a little different so the kids feel like it's a new learning environment. I make subtle changes so it doesn’t take them too long to get used to the new space.

Goal Bulletin Boards

Providing a new bulletin board for them to engage with helps them get into the mind frame of new learning. Usually we will do the reflection and goal setting for the new year in a creative flip book or combine our goals with a writing task.

Each year I have my students complete a New Year's Resolution flapbook. It gives the students an opportunity to reflect on goals for the year. I walk them through each flap and encourage them to set realistic goals. Students glue their flapbook on a colored piece of paper and write their goals on the paper underneath.

Once the flapbooks are complete, I hang them in the hallway!

These flapbooks are available for FREE in my TPT Store. Click the link below to get yours!

New Year Resolutions Activity

For a longer, more deliberate goal-setting activity, I love this one from Shelly Rees on TpT: New Years Resolution Bulletin Board and Goals Writing Activity. It's a great way to combine goals, writing, and the "Big Game"! It also works well because it can be done throughout the month as time allows and still be applicable into the next month because the Big Game is usually played the first weekend of February. Score!

Our Completed Bulletin Board

Students have an opportunity to engage their creative sides while working on their fine motor skills.

New Behavior Incentives

It seems like spring is full of state testing and benchmarks. Our schedules aren’t as consistent as we all need them to be either. I try to incorporate more choice into our days so the kids can feel like they do have some control over the craziness. I love to introduce choice balloons into the daily motivators. I create a Google form to inventory which things they would like to earn. They give me ideas that will help me differentiate my teaching as well as fun rewards they would like. I put a sticky note in each balloon before I blow it up. I post 3 balloons up in the front of the classroom. This provides them with a visual of what they are working towards. In the past I have created a rubric for their behavior and they earn points each day on factors such as: focus, noise level, work ethic. At the end of the day, or block, we orally go over the simple rubric. The students help me decide if they are worthy of their points (this helps them self evaluate themselves). If they get their points for the day they are one step closer to popping a balloon at the end of the day or week. Once the balloons are all popped, I put 3 new ones up to continue the motivation.

Making things fun and novel for the kids will help get you back into the swing of things as well. No one is super excited about coming back after a cozy vacation, but giving everyone new things to experience will help everyone start the last half of the school year with a little more zest and excitement.

Happy New Year!