I met the InTASC standard 1 in multiple ways including the time-spent teaching during my student teaching experiences.

At the beginning of my experience in a first grade classroom I was able to aide the teacher in assessing students current reading levels as well math level and writing abilities. I completed the tasks for TPA while I was teaching in a first grade classroom. The lesson that I created built on itself from day to day. The first day I introduced the children to a non-fiction book about the city and country. The next day I introduced the students to a fiction book. The last day, in a group less, the students compared and contrasted non-fiction to fiction. From the beginning to the end of the 8 weeks in a first grade classroom I saw all of the students progress in all areas. These areas include: cognitively, linguistically, socially and emotionally. There were students who were below, on, and above grade level. By the end of my 8 weeks all of the students had made gains in all areas. Some students progressed faster than others and that is something that is an individual process. Referring back to my TPA task student number one was a student who needed more attention than others to help him understand what the assignment was and how to complete the steps. As the 8 weeks continued this student made great gains in his linguistic skills and cognitive skills. All of the students in this first grade class enjoyed learning no matter what level they were at. It was obvious which students needed more modeling or even just some one on one attention to help them complete assignments. In order to accommodate all of the students to the degree that they needed, I made sure to walk around the room continuously and monitor all of the students work. The students who were in need of some scaffolding were the students that I would focus on first. A lot of these students were emergent spellers. These students know exactly what they want to write but only use one or two letters to write a whole word out. With these students the first step I would take is to ask them what they would like to write. I would normally write the sentence out on a sticky note. On the students paper I would write lines for the student to put their letters on. For example: ______ _______ ________ _______ this would represent a four letter word. I would write out the whole sentence like this. I would help the student fill in the words by saying them slowly so they can hear all of the sounds of the words and fill in the lines. This really breaks down the phonemes in the words. If the student is still struggling with this I would leave the post it note for the student to look after. For the students who needed some sort of challenge I would ask them to circle certain types of words that they wrote. Some examples would be: nouns, verbs, adjective, short /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ words. Depending on what we were learning that week or day I would ask the students to connect the current phonics lesson or fluency lesson into their writing. After a few times of asking students to do this they began to get the hang of it and would automatically do it on all of their writing pieces. The next step in challenging these advanced students would be to ask them to add detail to their writing. Sometimes in order to challenge them I would need to think of a deeper thinking question to ask them. By doing this I was furthering their learning on the topic at hand. Some students in the class would leave the classroom to participate in a social skills class. This was something that I became aware of and began to notice

these students behaviors in the classroom. I knew a couple of the skills that they were working on in their social skills class. So without the students thinking about their skills I made sure to monitor their progress on eye contact mostly. When these particular students would come up to talk to me I would make sure that they were making eye contact with me. I would give these students my undivided attention, this showed the students that I was the only person that they needed to worry about and that I was focusing on them and only them. Over the course of the weeks these students began to progress with their skills and were more confident in looking not only me but their classmate in the eyes when they were speaking to them. These students emotional development was higher by the end of my time there as well. They were more in tune with how they felt when they were using their skills correctly. They were not the only students who were making gains emotionally, all of the students were. First grade is a big step, the work is harder than it has ever been and they are expected to act in a different more mature way than they were able to in kindergarten. Remembering the skills from my student teaching experience will allow me to become a great teacher. Throughout my learning career at Drake we were always taught about differentiation. We were required to write lesson plans that were adapted to multiple levels. As a student teacher I really was able to see what this was all about. Having actual students to create lessons for is a complete different experience than just writing up a lesson for make believe students.