Another week has flown by. I feel like teaching 100% is quite exhausting! I am starting to get into the swing of things though through teaching every lesson. It has been fun, tiring, and very rewarding. I continue to learn new things every day. During this week I continued teaching math. We learned about the parts of a graph and how to properly label a graph. In order to do so I showed my students what a graph with no labels looks like and none of them could tell me what the graph was trying to represent. Of course they couldn’t! There were no labels. We talked as a class about how to label a graph and then to bring an experiential, hands on component to the lesson we made a human graph. I had a graph shape created using chart paper stapled together. I surveyed the class asking them what their favourite pizza topping is. Students got out of their desks and placed themselves accordingly on the graph based on the category options. I had labels written on index cards and we talked further about how we could label this graph. We had made a human graph and I think the students really enjoyed it! We learned that cheese pizza is the favourite amongst the class. Afterwards the class graphed their results on their own paper. I liked bringing that interactive component into math! The next couple of days we practiced tallying through reading the book “Tally O’Malley” and students followed along by tallying as we went through the book. Within the week students also got to think of their own survey question and polled the class by walking around and asking their classmates their question. From there they created a tally chart and a bar graph of their results and also analyzed their graph. Math is one of those subjects that can be a little tough to teach in a fun, interactive way but I think it’s important to try to incorporate interaction and hands-on learning into math always.
Throughout the week I also realized that there are always going to be early finishers. I have noticed that some students will get two lines written in the allotted time and others will be completely done their entire task. I am still learning about how to handle those early finishers and how to incorporate not necessarily extra work but learning how to help those students go deeper into their thinking. My SA told me that it’s not about providing extra, meaningless tasks to early finishers to work on just to fill time but rather helping those students process the information in a different way and really dig deep into their thoughts. I am still trying to figure that out!
This week students starting planning their fairy tales as well. Grades 2’s were instructed to rewrite Cinderella and grade 3’s to rewrite a fairy tale of their choice. I thought this was a pretty simple task and we had been talking about different versions of Cinderella for over a week. I taught the lesson and instructed the students to start their planning sheets. We had a conversation about the expectation and some ideas however after this lesson I realized the importance of modeling! It’s so important especially with younger grades to model, model, model! I thought they understood the task and were clear however after reading their fairy tale ideas afterwards I realized that they didn’t understand how to properly rewrite a fairy tale. I assessed their work and realized I needed to do another short lesson on what they were expected to do when rewriting a fairy tale. This time I had concrete examples written on the chart paper for students to see and we continued to have conversations of how to rewrite a fairy tale. I believe this time they got it but next week I will meet with the students one-on-one to help them complete their ideas.
Students also continued their animal research this week which is pretty self directed however they sure do have a lot of questions. Research is a difficult task and for younger students they are still learning how to read so asking them to read pages of facts and pick out the important facts fitting into particular headings is quite daunting and difficult. Often I find I have a small crowd of students trying to follow me around the room or standing at the table next to me with all of their questions. I am still trying to figure out how to avoid having students lining up but rather putting up their hand when they have questions. Although I tell them I will come to those who have their hand up, the reality is there is only one of me and truthfully it is hard to get to every student in an efficient way to answer all of their questions. I am still trying to figure out some techniques to work around this in the future.
Overall it was a successful week. Looking forward to continuing to learn and grow over the next weeks.
jonesrox
June 10, 2016 — 1:59 pm
Your students have been very busy as have you preparing all of the materials needed for their learning. It is true that there are always early finishers and that we need to provide for those students to make the extra time they have worthwhile, engaging, and enriching.
Teachers always find it difficult to get to each student as quickly as they would like to. Some use visuals on student desks such as a green and red sign that is flipped if all is good to green and turned to red when they have a question or need some help.