Kassie Vaughn

Journal Entries

Week of Jan. 27th-31st

January 27, 2014

Today I picked up Handwriting and Grammar, so now I am teaching three different subjects in the morning time. During our Spelling block, I continued introducing the Smart Board clickers to the students that I first presented on Friday. They were extremely excited to figure out that they could actually turn them on and answer Yes/No questions with them. As with all technology or anything new for that matter, there was some difficulty getting all children logged in at first, but I eventually solved the problem. I asked my class about six questions pertaining to their new Spelling words for the week, and they were instructed to respond with a Yes/No (Y/N) answer. I sought to establish a known rule for the students to always remember when they are using any kind of new material: Be Responsible.

January 28, 2014

We had an unexpected early dismissal today because of the cold weather and chance of snow coming our way! However, we were still able to accomplish a couple of lessons in Handwriting and Spelling before the kids left. In Handwriting, the students were reviewing the lower-case cursive letter a. In order to review writing the strokes of the letter, I had the children practice tracing with their finger in shaving cream. I sprayed shaving cream on each of their desks, had students spread it out, and practice writing the letter a over and over again. The children absolutely loved the activity, but it took a good bit of time and effort to clean up. For Spelling, I had the students use their Smart Board clickers once again to answer questions. In order to answer the questions, children analyzed their different words to determine how the long i sound appeared in the word: i, igh, ie, or y.

January 31, 2014

Today I had my first observation by Ms. Clark, during which she observed me teaching Spelling and Grammar. Since the children had their Spelling test to complete, I simply had them answer five questions (with A,B,C,D responses) about some of their words in order to give them a final practice. The questions were very similar to the ones I asked on Tuesday about the different appearances of the long i sound in their words. For Grammar, I had the students participate in a Subject-Verb matching game, where each was given part of a sentence and asked to find their classmate who had the other part by mingling around the classroom together (the subject and verb of each sentence must have matched). By integrating the use of the Smart Board clickers and Grammar activity, Ms. Clark was able to clearly see the use of technology and hands-on learning in my lessons. However, I must strive to incorporate higherorder thinking questions and organized transitioning into my instructional routines.