Monday Again

This morning, I arrived early to observe the peer mediator session before school. They introduced an activity for morning meeting where the mediators will go into classrooms and give students a paper heart. They will read a story where a child’s self esteem gets knocked down. Each time something happens to hurt the student in the story, the class crinkles their heart. At the end, all of the crinkles represent something that hurt their self esteem. While I was listening to that, I helped the other student teacher set up for our pit lesson this afternoon on tops. We got doodle tops and tops made out of straws to show the students. We also found a video on YouTube to introduce the tops lesson.

I taught the words of the week and chunk of the week this morning too. The words of the week lesson went very well. I am getting used to doing that. The chunk of the week was a little more difficult because the chunk was “-ing.” Many of the students wanted to use verbs like “running,” “jumping,” “swimming,” etc. But the chunk was really for words that had –ing as a part of the word, not as an ending (like ring, thing, swing, spring, etc.). That was probably something I should have clarified beforehand.

After lunch, I did the science and math lessons. In science today, I co-taught with the other student teacher in pit. We started the Motion part of the Balance and Motion unit. The subject was tops. We showed a video about spinning tops that the class really enjoyed. They got a little too excited though, and we needed to get them back on task after the video ended. There wasn’t a whole lot to this particular lesson, so we had to stretch out the material a bit. Most of the lesson consists of having a class make tops of their own, but with a large group of 62, we couldn’t do that in that time period. Instead, the classes will have opportunities to make tops later in their own classrooms. We used a document camera on the floor to show the tops spinning on the ground. That worked really well because everyone could see.

I wasn’t 100% sure what to do for math today, so I was really surprised my lesson went so well. I had a few Smartboard games and a cool interactive hundred chart to use to show patterns of numbers, and a basic plan, but it didn’t seem quite long enough. We counted by tens first, then fives. Then we did a worksheet together. The class was getting antsy so I told them I had another worksheet or a game and we could do the game if they were well behaved and quiet. If not, I said we’d have to go back to our desks to work on the worksheet. That helped them settle down a lot and we played a Smartboard game using the hundreds board. When that was over, I still had a chunk of time to fill. On the spot, I decided to give each table one blank hundreds chart. We started with the captain and we had them quietly pass the paper around, each student adding the next number. I told them that when their table finished, they needed to turn the paper over and put their heads down so I would know they were done. Table 1 finished first. I used the game to explain to the class my new incentive board. Since we had filled up our hundreds board, I designed a new board with hearts that had each students’ name on it. I explained that they could stamp their hearts instead of signing the hundreds board. When they get 5 stamps, they’ll get to pick from the surprise box. Then they get 10, they can pick from the rewards chart. The winning table got to be the first four to stamp their hearts.