No-Snow Tuesday

I’m glad today isn’t a snow day! It seemed to be heading in that direction based on the weather forecast, but I woke up this morning to find that it’s not so bad out yet and school is going on as scheduled, for once. This morning I met with the other student teacher to set up our lesson in pit again. We realized it’s a shame the way they do these lessons in such a large group. The experiments are shown to the whole group with a few volunteers. Then, they might try it in class, but most of the time, the classes never get to it. It almost defeats the purpose of the learning by doing that these lessons are built around.

The students learned about nouns today in their mini-lessons. They seemed to pick up on them faster than adjectives, and I still feel that it would have been easier to teach adjectives after nouns, but this is working out ok. There was a great activity on the Smartboard that gave a list of words and they needed to drag them into either a “nouns” or “not nouns” bin. The rest of the students gave a “thumbs up” if they thought it was a noun, and a “thumbs down” if they thought the word was not a noun. A new activity was also added to the “work on writing” center, which the students seem to enjoy. There are mini pre-made books and the students can write their own story in them, and illustrate the book as well. As they finish, they can put them in a bin to share with the class. This addition made a lot of students choose to work on writing, and we had 2 students share their books with the class. We noticed that the books, only 3 pages long (plus a cover) were probably too short for them, so we are going to run off pages and give them the ability to add more pages if they need to.

Pit went pretty well today. It was our second time co-teaching and it worked out even better, probably because the experiment we did was a little more complex. It involved balancing a triangle and an arch on a popsicle stick. We had a bunch of volunteers come up and try it, and I really felt like the students were getting the concept of counterweights and balance points. We used a scanned image of a worksheet with different scenarios on it to try out. It worked well to have the students give either thumbs up or thumbs down to let us know if they thought the shapes would balance. That works really well with such a large group of kids.

Math, on the other hand, was crazy. I was teaching trading ten ones to make a ten, and it was definitely a tough concept. The other student teacher taught the same lesson to her class today too and had the same issues, so that did make me feel a little bit better. I asked my CT if there was a better way to explain it and she basically told me that it really is a hard concept and that I explained it well, but we just need to review it more and keep reinforcing it and going over it. Because it was a tough concept, I felt that I was losing them a lot of the time. At the end, we played “around the world” with addition flash cards. They really enjoyed the game, but were getting silly. I told them a few times that it didn’t seem like they were shaped up enough to play. I gave quite a few time outs as well. It would work for a second every time, but then it dissolved again. My CT told me not to be afraid to just stop the game and have them sit down with their heads down at their desks if they can’t control themselves. I may need to use that strategy sometime.

The end of the day went quickly. My CT gave me her midterm evaluation of me that she is sending to my school and I was happy with what she wrote. I feel like I’m really learning a lot, so much more than I ever could have learned in regular classes about teaching.