Today I Feel Like a Teacher

I taught my first real life full length Math lesson today.  I was nervous.  Math has never been my strong suit.  It turns out that things as simple as adding and subtracting are done way differently than the way I learned to do it.  This makes things difficult when you are trying to teach something that relies on some form of computation, as mine did today.  Today’s lesson was about estimating differences.

These poor students were subjected to a lot of Math today.  They started with their Bell Work (written and expanded form of a number) as they do every morning, then they did their Math CAT test (which is interesting on it’s own) in place of their Daily 5, and then came my 60 minutes of Math.  Way too much, but since that is what my lesson was prepared for as per discussion, that is what I taught.  I knew keeping their attention through my direct teaching was going to be tough after so much Math focus so I wanted to get right to the game I had planned for them.

My students were supposed to have the concepts of using front-end rounding, compatible numbers, compensation, and estimating sums down from their previous lessons.  Only trouble with that was my students were behind in their Math.  This could have turned my entire lesson into a huge mess, but I tried not to let that happen.  Instead I decided to take a bunch of things out of my lesson and bring the focus strictly to estimating by rounding to the thousands position and then subtracting.  I started by drawing a bar on the board with Ballpark Estimate on one side and Close to the Actual on the other so the students could see when it was appropriate to be far off than the actual or when it is necessary to be closer to the actual number when estimating.  The students required a little prompting to come up with examples that weren’t just numbers but rather real life examples.  It seemed that by the end of that they understood a little bit better.  For the actual lesson part it was clear who were the strong students in Math and who just didn’t get it.

After providing the students with a couple examples that we worked through together and introducing the concept of Benchmarks (without mentioning the term itself) we moved on to the game.  There were some students who performed really well on their own and didn’t need much instruction and others who needed a lot of instruction.  One of the most rewarding parts was seeing how excited a couple of students were when they went from admittedly not knowing what I was talking about to coming up to me to show me that they had gotten one or two completely on their own.  It was such an awesome feeling.  It is what made me feel like a real teacher today.

One thing that I really need to work on is watching the time.  That hour flew by! I would have loved to have had more time for the game and I missed my exit slip completely.  I think I need to carry my phone to buzz and notify me when I need to go from set to development to my closure.  I think I will continue to learn something every lesson, and I am okay with that.

Since I missed what was supposed to be my awesome Halloween Art lesson, I am up for Art again in two weeks!

Have a great Remembrance Day and I look forward to any feedback!

Jen

 

My First Mini Lesson

Today was only my second time in the classroom and so it was my first time taking a crack at “teaching”.  I over planned a 15 minute pre-Daily 5 lesson about a couple of Word Attack Strategies to use while reading to self.  I would say that overall it went pretty well.  The students were really responsive to my prompting questions.  Part of my over planning was in anticipation of me being at the front of the classroom asking questions to absolute silence.  That was not the case at all!  I started by telling the students that I would only be taking answers by people with their hands up and went on to asking the questions.  Lo and behold, I would ask a question and a bunch of little hands shot up in the air!

While the lesson and participation went well, I don’t feel like the students truly understood or retained any of my little strategies.  Some strategies they were already a little familiar with and others could have probably filled an entire lesson.  I don’t consider this any sort of failure on my point, rather it just makes me so much more excited to have a classroom of my own.  It is hard being in a classroom only once a week because you don’t really know what the students know and understand already.  Or even more important, you don’t know how they learn.

We have a great Co-op who is so flexible on what we want to teach, but I can see how with such little time in the classroom the draw of more structure might seem easier.  I am not letting this discourage me.  At this point we are all way underprepared to have our own classrooms full-time and so we are just currently dipping our toes in the proverbial waters.  This is why next week I have decided to jump on a Math lesson; something I am the opposite of familiar with.  Try them all while I can!

Wish me luck!

Jen