Dear Amy, Over my IMB placement, I was placed at Corvian Community School which is a charter school.

This experience was very different to me than any other experience I have been in before. My pervious schools had been Title 1 schools and public schools. Charter schools are much different than I had expected. All the classrooms had 22 students and each classroom had an assistant that helped the teacher. It was encouraging to see how well my teacher and her assistant go along with one another. I got to see how beneficial it was having an assistant in the classroom was at all times. Not only did she have an assistant, parent volunteers were continuously in the classroom and conferencing with the students. The classroom was very spacious and had a lot of room for the students to do their work. Students were allowed to move around the classroom and work in areas that they were comfortable in. My teacher was super helpful to me and provided me with books, materials, and standards that will be helpful to me as a teacher. She allowed me to look at her lesson plans and showed me how her and the other fourth grade teachers planned for their weeks. The students were great and seemed like they were eager to learn when they came into the classroom. They listened well and were very teachable. The students respected one another well and you could tell that respect was implemented in the environment of the classroom. My experience with the teacher and the students was encouraging and affirming that I will be able to put what I am learning into practice during my yearlong internship. Since I was in a fourth grade class, my class was focused on North Carolina history. My fourth graders were learning about the Lost Colony which is what my lesson was focused on. I had to do some research to refresh my mind on the lost colony. Especially since I did not grow up in school in North Carolina, I have never learned in depth about North Carolina history. My teacher gave me the standards to meet for this lesson. I printed off an article from Scholastic on the lost colony. Before reading the article, I asked students to tell me what they have learned so far in class about this subject. Students sat on the rug and informed me on some things that they found important about the lost colony and they named some people who played major roles during this time. After we reviewed what we had already learned, students partnered up and read the scholastic article together. After they read, they summarized to one another what they had learned. There was a question at the end of the article that asked students to write about what they think happened to the lost colony. Students opened up their day books and wrote what they think happened to the lost colony by using previous knowledge and facts from the articles. Students were then broken up into groups and we played the game connection. One student stood in a circle a read off what they thought happened to the lost colony. If another student agreed with their statement they yelled connection! and switched spots with the student in the middle. Once a student made a connection with someone they sat down in the circle. The point was to see how fast they could connect their responses to one another. I was surprised at my lesson. I was nervous about this lesson just because the lost colony is something that I was not super familiar with. But overall, I believe my lesson went pretty well. I received good feedback from my teacher and my assistant on this lesson. The students were very involved and were super

receptive to the lesson. They were able to tell me new things they learned after the lesson and were able to use their imagination as well in describing what they think may have happened to the lost colony. I think there is always room to improve in my lesson and I should have been much more confident while teaching. I think that I could have been clearer while I was explaining the objective and standard to them as well. I think one thing I did well was getting an idea of their previous knowledge because it allowed me to see what they did know and also seeing what they did not know yet. I made a lot of connections during my time in the classroom. My classroom focused a lot on making their students good citizens. They did this by having a creed for the school called the I am creed and by also having a classroom promise which is very similar to a class constitution. The I am creed is something that is hung up in every classroom and is something that each classroom recites in the beginning of the day; they also recite their class promises. Having these class creeds and promise allows teachers to hold students to clear standards that are presented on the board of the class. This is something we had talked about in class and it was awesome to see it implemented in the classroom. The teacher was able to question students behavior by asking them if they were holding themselves to the standards in their class promise. I also got to see a lot in the classroom on assessing which is something that we read about in our Social Studies Alive! book. My teacher assessed students in different ways that were helpful for the students. She did one on one conferencing with students and had questions to ask them individually. This showed me that assessing can be done in several different ways. IMB has definitely progressed me as a teacher in many ways. It taught me how to put my students at the center of my teaching and how to be flexible with my teaching and lessons. One thing I learned that was beneficial is that what I have planned may not always go accordingly but thats okay and I dont need to freak out when that happens. My teacher was super flexible with her students while also having authority over them. She knew had to meet each student individual needs and meet the needs of her class as a whole. I really enjoyed getting to be a part of this classroom and being in a Charter school. I feel that is has given me more experience in different classroom settings and will definitely be beneficial to me and my future as an educator.

Sincerely, Abby Menchinger