Welcome

Hi everyone
My name is Bree Villanueva. I am finishing my Masters in Elementary Education at National University. I love working with kids and feel it is my calling. Partly because its kind of a Genetic thing for me. I am a third generation teacher (or soon to be) with several cousins who have answered the call as well. Anyone who did not go into education has chosen the Military or Medicine.... so still helping others or protecting them. HAHA... But enough about me......





Welcome to a teacher's post. I am excited to share with you my experiences about teaching. I am currently a Bilingual Teacher's Aide and will be teaching my first year this coming fall. Sometimes you can feel like a crazy person running around trying to get everything done and often times that leads to extra stress that you do not need. I have felt like this opossum several times. Like I have taken on too much and gotten myself stuck in a situation that I cannot get myself out of. I'm scared and ready to snap. However there are several ways we as teachers can help alleviate that stress not only for ourselves, but for our students as well. Believe it or not, being a student is hard work. Our students are young and are being asked to sit still for long periods of time. On top of that they are being asked to remember lots of information. Many do not understand for several reasons.

I guess you could say I am a strict teacher. I expect the students to a least try. I am strict with a hug. I believe that students need to know boundaries. Every kid will test you. They want to know what they can and cannot get away with. I have seen several times where the teacher who is all sunshine and roses has a hard time with the class. They do not respect their teacher because they do not know their boundaries. I hope to gain the trust of my students and respect. I of course respect flows both ways. However I cannot hope to teach anything if I cannot manage my classroom.

I learn from more of a hands on style as well as visual. I hope that this will also help my students. Since I learn best if I am enjoying myself my students should also have the same opportunity. If students are not having fun they get board and begin to shut down in class, and that is when management/ behavior problems begin.

There are a few things I have done to differentiate the learning for my small group of students I work with each hour. The first thing I did was move my 'kidney' table closer to the white board. Many students are near sighted and have a hard time seeing the board. And others many not hear as well so speaking louder would be beneficial. These are probably the first things to do with any classroom. Making sure that all students can see and hear what you are doing in front eliminates a good portion of any problems you may be facing.

Other not so easy problems are what I deal with. Language barrier. Since I work with the students who speak another language other than English at home, many times they fall behind due to simple miscommunication. So when I get these students and their teacher tells me that they cannot comprehend what they are reading for the life of them I have to think, "Um Yes. They do not know all the words." So what I do is to first ask them what they do remember from the story. After that we will read slowly stopping when they do not understand a word or phrase. This can be a tedious process depending on how much English the student does or doesn't know. Generally if a teacher can front load these words before hand, it can help. Front Loading means that the teacher begins by giving the students a list of vocabulary that may be difficult or new to the students. The entire class would go over the words before they even opened their books.

Another trick I like to use, especially like to use with math is write out every step it would take to solve the problem. This takes up a lot of space on the board, but if the students also write it down they will have a template to fall back on when they have trouble later. I do this in the following:






There are so many ways to modify the learning of our students. As teachers it is our job to help each one of them succeed as a student.