I had an awesome experience at Zion Lutheran and gained many insights from this

experience. I had the opportunity to teach physical education to first graders at Zion Lutheran

with Morgan Daubert as a co-teacher. I am so glad that we have the opportunity to go in and

actually teach a physical education class before we go into student teaching. This opportunity is

extremely helpful in discovering things that work and things that do not work. 

Developing lesson plans that are at the appropriate grade level as well as active and

engaging was very useful. We were able to develop multiple lessons for a subject in a timely

manner as we taught them. It was very useful that our professor, Dr. Adkins, gave us a

curriculum map to help guide our lessons. I learned a lot about building and developing quality

lessons with all the components (standards, objectives, instant activity, fitness activity, main

activity, and assessment). I liked the freedom of the lessons and I had the students try things they

have never done before and they weren’t sure about some of them, but ended up loving the

activities. It was also awesome to practice co-teaching with a peer at UNK; we had to be in touch

about what happened each day, how far they got in the lesson, what each of us planned to do, if

we wanted to change things, etc. It was nice to get that component because I know teaching takes

a lot of communication and collaboration to help the student's be successful. When teaching the

lessons, I knew that not everything would not go as planned and was able to learn to quickly

adapt things to make it work. 

When beginning to teach at Zion, I was so nervous, but now I feel so much more

confident and will be ready to jump right in when teaching. It was nice to be able to try different

aspects of behavior management plans, discipline, motivation, etc. I liked the safe seat that I used

as well as the keys to success, I felt it helped the students have more structure and were held to a

high standard. Start and stop signals as well as transitions were great to practice here, and now it
feels like I don’t have to think about what to do or say with these I just do them. Even trying

different teaching styles, I ended up doing more teacher centered for my first graders because

they were able to get more done without so many distractions/disruptions/confusion. 

I also realized that it is so hard to build relationships in the PE aspect because you are in a

go go go state. You want the students to be active and moving and when they aren’t you are

giving instruction, so I think I need to work on building relationships with my students. I have

many things I can still learn and improve on, but I have really gotten a quality experience at Zion

and was able to better myself as a teacher through this experience.