EDPR 3100- Kindergarten
This was the first practicum I took part in. Once a week I went to the class for a total of eight weeks. Initially, I was a little scared to be in a kindergarten class, but I quickly found it was my favorite grade. It was easy to bond with the students and I felt like a rockstar after each day. They lead such simple lives yet their interests were so vast and different. This class was where I taught my first lessons and felt myself step into the role of the teacher. I became comfortable leading the class and going through trial and error to see what fit both myself and the students. This class will always hold a special place in my heart as the class that I felt myself becoming the educator I am today.
EDPR 3200- Grade 5/6
This practicum took place over a two-week period, with more responsibility than my previous practicum. I completed two units in math and science, both with a total of four lessons each. I initially thought because I loved kindergarten so much that this grade might not be the best fit for me. Once again, I was wrong and I ended up loving my time in this class! It was a little harder to build bonds with the students but once we all became comfortable with each other we had a blast. This practicum was at a school on the North Shore, and many of the students had pretty hard home lives. This was the most eye-opening practicum in this sense. Some of the students were going through things that were so difficult for me to comprehend because they were so young. It almost felt silly for me to ask them to focus on building paper cities and creating egg cars when their mind was clearly elsewhere. My TM helped me to understand that you don’t have to fix the problems you just have to be a sounding board for them while they are with you. You just have to be encouraging and let them know that you’re there for them if they want you to be.
EDPR 4100
For this three-week practicum, I became familiar with the class that would soon be my certification practicum class. I had the opportunity to sit in on kindergarten interviews and see how one begins the year with such new students. My units were all based on creating community and learning classroom routines. I quickly bonded with the students, especially our student with autism. He was struggling as he had obviously never been in a school setting before. I used their free time to just sit with him and learn how he operates, and to find out what kind of instruction did and didn’t work with him. By the end of the practicum he had made significant progress and we had a good repertoire established. Over the few months that I was gone, he had support from CEA’s and they made tremendous progress with him that allowed me to come back in January and pick up where we left off.
Certification practicum
This practicum was everything I could’ve imagined and more. I grew so much as an educator and became much more confident than I have been in the classroom. My bond with the students was solidified from the previous classroom, so I felt like we picked up where we left off. Our student with autism made amazing progress, he was a completely different student. My main goal for him was to get him to just be where the students were and hoping that I could get him to do the activities with adaptations, despite the fact that this was not one of his current goals. Through collaboration with my TM and his CEA’s, he participated in most of our activities with extra support and through catering to his interests. In this practicum, I tried new things that I wouldn’t have imagined I could do before such as complicated art projects, science experiments stations, floor hockey, as well as leading field trips. By the time I was teaching full-time, I had already felt confident enough to have my own classroom. I went through a whole week with a substitute and it went as smoothly as it could’ve. I’m really proud of the progress I made with my teaching and the bonds I made with the students. I hope to return to this classroom as a substitute.