Intern Experience Week #1

Currently I am in my secondary special education placement at South Harrison Middle school. I love working with this age of students so my time in the classroom has really been a joy so far. It has been a little adjustment with my planning because I am so use to creating lessons for a much younger age group, but the challenge has been very informational. This past summer I lived and worked with children of this age in an outdoor educational setting, so this experience definitely has helped prepare me for my time in the classroom this fall. So far in my placement I have been teaching science, math, and anything else my teacher needs of me. My only other science teaching experience has been with kindergarten, therefore this whole planning process for science is completely new and I'm finding that I need to be more knowledgeable with the content because of the grade levels and subject matter. My only concern is that I am picking subjects that are two challenging for my students. I have been looking over the CSO's and am trying to sort of water down the material to a more simple form so that it is easier for the students to comprehend. I am really excited about a portion of the unit I am currently teaching that we will cover next week, which is on volcanoes. I plan on having the students create their own volcano diagrams and then conduct an experiment where we recreate lava flow.