Personal Narrative: My Practicum Situation

My practicum situation is different from a typical general-education classroom, therefore my cooperating teacher, Mr. Callahan, had to provide special explanation and instruction about his fifth grade self contained classroom. He told me that his fifth graders are academically at a second grade level. As for my role in his classroom, he explained to me that I should expect to be put to work over the next few weeks of practicum. This included working individually with his eight students, as well as delivering a lesson by the end of this experience, which made me nervous but also excited.
My first impression of the classroom was that is was quite large and spacious, especially for a class of only eight students. Around the classroom, Mr. Callahan had books displayed of different genres from picture books to young adult. The first language arts lesson that I observed was relaxed in the sense that for most of the time they did a craft. Mr. Callahan explained to me that this will not be the typical literacy lesson, today was …show more content…
Fifth grade is one of the grades that I would prefer to teach and this will be a great opportunity to examine a working fifth grade class. My time in Mr. Callahan’s classroom will either reinforce that I want to teach fifth grade or it will help me realize that I need to reconsider which grades I would want to teach. Working with his self-contained classroom may also open my mind to the idea of working with special education or urban education students. I work with fifth graders at my current job at my local YMCA but I am expecting practicum to be a much different experience being that this takes place in a professional school environment. I am also excited to approach this with a literacy perspective and apply my knowledge from class to what I will observe and work with in the classroom. All in all, the next few weeks will definitely help build my skills as a teaching