I've been teaching Language Arts pretty much every day for about two weeks now. I am having so much fun! I taught a lesson on prefixes, suffixes, and roots on Monday, and I found this rap song to play for the students. They really got into it! Some of them were even singing along by the 3rd time I played it (they kept begging to listen again). They told me that I needed to tell all the other preservice teachers about this rap whenever I had class at WVU again. It was funny, but most importantly, they were learning. One student was thinking out loud and put the prefix "hemo" with the suffix "phobia" to get "hemophobia". He then connected that to his cousin who fainted whenever he saw blood. I think that lesson really clicked with this student.
We also started writing Monster Stories this week. The students were so excited about creating their own monsters. I did an activity on writing descriptively by including details from the 5 senses. We filled up the entire chalk board with words. They took about 40 minutes on Friday just to write, and, to my surprise, nearly every student was writing the entire time! This was really one of the first big writing assignments they'd had all year, and they did a fantastic job. I sat down and wrote along with them. I think modeling for the students helped them really get excited about writing. Enthusiasm is contagious. However, I did notice a few students wanted to change their monsters after looking at mine. I don't want them to change their ideas to match mine. I told them to keep their monsters and that there would be time to share ideas during peer review next week. I'm pretty excited to see how their stories turn out!
