Lots of Lessons!

Morning: We start our Balance and Motion unit today in pit. I met with the other student teacher, who I am working on this with, and we briefly went over our lesson this morning. It seems like we are pretty much ready to go. We don’t have enough supplies for every class, but we will be demonstrating the experiments in the pit and then giving each classroom a few supplies so that students can try them out back in their classrooms later in the day.

I quickly taught the words of the week and chunk of the week this morning. Those lessons are fast and pretty easy. I am getting used to them. They’re a little repetitive, but the students know exactly what to do and what they will be doing, so it flows well. It’s hard sometimes to tell a student they’re wrong when they pick a word for “chunk of the week” that doesn’t go. For example, our chunk of the week was –ake. So, students brainstorm words that have –ake in them (bake, make, take, etc). One student said “tummy ache.” I just explained that, yes, it sounds like it should end in –ake, but it’s actually spelled differently, with “ache.”

Afternoon: The lesson in the pit went really well – it seemed to go by quickly. The principal walked in right at the beginning and that made us both a little nervous, but it was good to start that out by co-teaching. Vanessa and I worked well together and the other teachers were all there to be supportive and keep their classes in check. The first lesson in that unit doesn’t have much to it, but we took a bunch of volunteers to try the first experiment to draw it out a bit.

After pit, we had an assembly with “the balloon guy.” That was pretty insane. The balloon guy was fun and funny and the kids loved him, but they went crazy. They were screaming and yelling and jumping up with excitement at every move. He had volunteers come up and those volunteers got balloons. At one point, when the volunteers left the stage, other kids tried to grab their balloons. The principal calmed them all down. After the show. They had recess, but then they were back in time for a quick snack and math lesson. My math lesson went well despite some calling out. They were still excited and chatting about the balloons. We did a quick Smartboard lesson and worksheet on estimating. Then I had a basket filled with blocks and asked them to estimate the number of blocks in the basket. The winners got to sign the hundreds board. The hundreds board is now all filled up with names, so pretty soon we will select a winner at random to choose his or her prize. That took us right up to the end of the day, so the timing worked out perfectly.