Loud Thursday

I am tired today. I taught pretty much all day again and it went well. The class was chatty from the get go, so we were all having trouble getting them to focus. The morning lessons were probably the best, but all of them went pretty well. By the end of the day they had started getting really crazy, but I felt calmer and ready to deal with it. I gave a bunch of time outs and each time I did, they would shape up and pay a little more attention until it broke down again. During math, I had set up to play a few probability games with different math stations around the room, but the class was getting too crazy. I pulled everyone back and told them that we can’t handle playing games today and we’d just sit up front and do the lesson regularly. We played a Smartboard game and I had them stand up and sit down for different answers to try to get them moving in a more controlled manner. I told them I was really sad that we weren’t going to get to play the games and that maybe if everyone is shaped up throughout the rest of the lesson we could play. I am planning on playing the game tomorrow instead, since we originally scheduled two days to teach probability anyway. Hopefully we can play the game because I think it would be fun. It’ll give me a way to start the lesson tomorrow – telling them that I hope we can play our game today and that they need to remember their self controls.

In the afternoon, instead of going to computers, we visited our buddy class – a 4th grade class out in the trailers. Each 4th grader had a 1st grade buddy. They did buddy reading. I was amazed how different it can be in the trailers. I remember being out in the trailers myself and how much I loved those classrooms. I still like them now. The class got very loud, but it was ok because there weren’t other classes in the same room or next door that would be disturbed. I think I like closed classrooms better than open. In a closed classroom, I wouldn’t want to be loud all the time, but when we do activities, it would be fun to not have to be as incredibly conscious of the noise level. The only problem was, after the buddy read, walking back to the classroom, out class was crazy. They were running and yelling when we went outside to walk back. My CT spoke to them when we got back in the building and we didn’t play silent ball like we usually do at the end of the day because they were acting too crazy.