Year 4 Portfolio Critique and Hopes for Year 5 Portfolio

Overall, I was very pleased with the way my Year 4 Portfolio turned out. For starters, I was able to include a lot of good samples of work that I feel truly represent my abilities and strengths as a teacher. For example in the section Two Examples of Work Completed in Professional Education Courses, I included a lesson on fact and opinion that I had created for my EDUC 414 Creative Expressions class. Since the lesson was done around the time of Halloween, I decided to incorporate the holiday into the lesson as well as different aspects of the arts and creativity. To start off, I had the students sing a song titled “Francine the Nice Witch” which was sung to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”. After singing through the songs a few times, I had the students stand up and either create “F” or “O” with their arms in order to show if each line in the song represented a fact or opinion. Afterward, I had the students decorate a picture of something that represented Halloween and had them write both a fact and opinion statement about the picture or the holiday itself. I feel that this shows my strengths as a teacher because it shows that I like to bring creativity into my lessons. This artifact also shows that I consider all learning styles while creating my lessons to ensure that each child has a fair chance at learning the presented information.

I was also happy with the overall look of my portfolio. I ensured to make sure that my tabs stuck out far enough this time because when I had handed in my first portfolio, they did not. I also wanted to have a common theme for this portfolio, so I found decorated paper that I felt represented me and my passion for elementary teaching and incorporated it throughout the entire portfolio.

For my Year 5 Portfolio, I hope to make my action research artifact a better representative of who I am as a teacher. For my Year 4 Portfolio, I decided to include my action research assignment from Fall semester of my participant year which included a power point slide presentation of the data that I had collected. On my next portfolio, I hope to include my action research that I complete this year. With that said, I will make sure that I include all the aspects of this project such as the brief, notes from the data taking process, my charts, and my final paper. I think that if I include all of these aspects, my teaching strengths will show.

"Welcome To Fairmont Senior"

For my Intern 5 week Special Education placement, I am currently at Fairmont Senior High School. Here, I will be working with 9th, 11th, and 12th graders in the subjects of math and chemistry. I will also be working with an individual student for one period using Plato program. Our students were scheduled to arrive last Thursday 8/18, but due to a construction and espestis problem…the date was pushed back until tomorrow 8/24. Although the students have not arrived yet, I have been enjoying getting to know my mentor teacher as well as the rest of the Fairmont Senior staff. They have all been extremely helpful and welcoming (especially through these difficult times). Because this is the first time I have ever been in a high school teaching setting, they have been willing to help in whatever way possible and offering lots of great advice. I am very excited to take on this challenge of teaching the high school students, especially in an area in which I am not my strongest…MATH.