Week Nine: Carl Sandburg

            This was my first full week at Carl Sandburg High School. What an experience it has been so far! I finished my observing in the beginning of this week and started taking over some of the morning classes. I will be teaching five classes in all. These classes are Science, functional science, daily living skills, vocational, and functional math. I started teaching the first period science on Tuesday.

The difference between the two science classes is the cognitive level of the students. My first period science is high functioning and is able to read and answer questions from their text book. They are able to answer the questions by the help of the notes that I write on the board. I always review the chapter ahead of time and look to see what the questions ask. I then will write the notes on the board so that students can look back in their notes or look at the key terms for the answers.

I am very excited to teach my functional science as well. I just created a power point from a packet that my teacher printed off from “Science A-Z.” I created this power point because we have a student who has a hard time concentrating on reading and can have behaviors because of it. I wanted to see if technology would help this matter at all.

I only have three students in my daily living skills class. In this class, we work on helping our students for when they are out high school and to be prepared for the daily life and its challenges. On Monday went through our recipe book and the students were able to pick what they wanted to make. On Wednesday, we took the students to the grocery store and they had to find the ingredients in the store independently. We ended up making the recipe on Friday and I enjoyed watching the students work in the kitchen. This week I will start a unit with my students. I looked through a book and found a section on “how to run a household.”

In my vocational class the students are given specific tasks to do around the high school. For example three of my students will work in the cafeteria to help the lunch ladies clean the dishes after lunch. Other students will help clean the tables or mop the floors. I have two higher level students that will work out of the Dean’s and Guidance off and will deliver messages or mail to the mail boxes or to the classrooms. They are with me for the last twenty minutes where they have to fill out their time sheet and get “Sandberg dollars” for the work they do in the school.

My last class is functional math. In this class we work through a textbook and students use math that will be used in daily life. For example they balance a checkbook, figure out an annual salary, and other areas that the student needs to know in order to succeed independently.

This week we had parent teacher conferences. The students did not have class on Thursday and Friday because of this. We had our first conference at 12pm and the last one at 7:50pm.  Since my teacher and I had a couple of hours in the afternoon she took me through the whole process she takes to write an IEP on “Easy IEP.” It was great learning about this since many schools use this program. She also taught me the process on how to change a part of the IEP which they call an “Amendments.” I have always felt insecure about handling IEP’s on my own in my own future classroom and this meeting really helped me to learn more about it and the process my teacher takes in order to accomplish this. She currently has thirteen students in her case load and is charge of writing an IEP for each of those students.