I am very excited about this new self-contained class that I'll be teaching. My district, and the middle school especially, has had an ever increasing number of new immigrant students and our older learners are really struggling to adapt and survive in the general education classrooms. This class will allow them to continue their academic progress while simultaneously developing their English language skills. It's also great because starting as early as this fall, definitely within the next two years, we are going to be welcoming and caring for a large group of Syrian refugees! I'm looking forward to having students from that part of the world again. I love my Hispanic students but the last two years have held a certain amount of culture shock for me as my previous students were almost exclusively from Muslim countries in the middle east and Indian subcontinent region. I think my current students will really thrive with the new program, and it's very good to have it in place and start working the kinks out before our refugees arrive. In preparation for the class I'm spending a good chunk of my summer developing a new comer's science and social studies curriculum as well as figuring out the most important units from the three grades of math curriculum and how best to present them to the students. I have a general curriculum map made and I'm ready to start on the scope and sequence. After that it'll be time to lesson plan until the cows come home! The goal is to have 2-3 units for every subject (English, math, science, social studies, reading) complete and ready to go before I go back to school in August. Hopefully I won't have to do much in the way of lesson planning until after Thanksgiving so I can concentrate on the wedding and being back in school myself (adding a couple content area endorsements, no degrees this time) this fall.
What a crazy year 2015-2016 was! My class sizes literally doubled, I had new curriculum (no surprise there), developed a multi-grade math class and volunteered (was volun-told?) for several new committees; and that was just the professional changes! The end result was a great school year, a lot of stretching and professional learning and almost no time for blogging. I'm hoping to get back to it this summer and be more consistent next year, but not sure that will happen. The reason for my doubt is that there are more changes coming my way: I'm getting married in October, trialing a self-contained new comers class (which includes writing multi-grade curriculum for two new subjects and developing a combined curriculum for a third) and returning to school.
I am very excited about this new self-contained class that I'll be teaching. My district, and the middle school especially, has had an ever increasing number of new immigrant students and our older learners are really struggling to adapt and survive in the general education classrooms. This class will allow them to continue their academic progress while simultaneously developing their English language skills. It's also great because starting as early as this fall, definitely within the next two years, we are going to be welcoming and caring for a large group of Syrian refugees! I'm looking forward to having students from that part of the world again. I love my Hispanic students but the last two years have held a certain amount of culture shock for me as my previous students were almost exclusively from Muslim countries in the middle east and Indian subcontinent region. I think my current students will really thrive with the new program, and it's very good to have it in place and start working the kinks out before our refugees arrive. In preparation for the class I'm spending a good chunk of my summer developing a new comer's science and social studies curriculum as well as figuring out the most important units from the three grades of math curriculum and how best to present them to the students. I have a general curriculum map made and I'm ready to start on the scope and sequence. After that it'll be time to lesson plan until the cows come home! The goal is to have 2-3 units for every subject (English, math, science, social studies, reading) complete and ready to go before I go back to school in August. Hopefully I won't have to do much in the way of lesson planning until after Thanksgiving so I can concentrate on the wedding and being back in school myself (adding a couple content area endorsements, no degrees this time) this fall.
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AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
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