Moving on to the second week of our long-term practicum, I have begun to teach a little more than last week. The more I get to teach, the more exciting this all becomes! Today, I began with language arts and then math before recess. Between recess and lunch I continued my Socials unit on India.

Coming back from a four-day weekend, the students seemed to sort of be out of their school mindset. So beginning with some independent journal writing was great to transition back into school-mode and get the students’ thinking caps on. I am looking forward to collecting these journals after the next entry as there is a variety of different topics students can write on. This allows students autonomy in the choice of their writing topic and they are able to write as much as they want – choosing their own pace (With a minimum of one entry each time).

However, when we moved on to talking about the homework assigned from last Thursday, my s.a. and I quickly noticed a lot of the students had not completed some parts of their homework. (Again, probably due to the four-day long weekend). So we decided to have a short discussion about why it is important to do homework, especially when there was so much time given to complete. Along with this, the consequences of not completing homework – my s.a. related this to the real world by explaining when an individual has a job, their boss will expect certain things and if you do not meet these expectations, there can be negative consequences like losing your job. As a result, we decided to give consequences today as well, asking students to stay in at recess to finish up their missing homework. Again my s.a. explained this was not done to be unkind, but instead to prepare students for high school and the expectations they will face. Something I have noticed over the last couple weeks is that a lot of students do not make use of their agendas to record their homework. So I have explained to the students that these agendas are really important so that students to have just mentally remember what homework they have. More importantly, if they keep forgetting their homework, they will form a bad habit, which will really harm them in high school – where teachers do deduct marks when homework is incomplete or late. Something my s.a. and I have thought of doing to help with this is including the agendas in our new points system we will be implementing starting tomorrow.

After lunch, I taught the next lesson in my Socials India unit – we discussed the rise and the fall of the Indus Valley civilization. I began my lesson a little differently, without me teaching. Instead, I showed a video on this topic so that students would have more of a visual understanding as well – because I know that in this class, there are many students who are more of visual learners, taking more from pictures and audio than just words. However, I think it is really important to give some meaning to watching the video, so I had asked students to pay close attention to certain aspects of the movie – the lifestyle, occupations, geography, and building. We then did Cornell notes as a class out of the textbook. I thought it was really important to do this for this part of the chapter as it has some of the most important information. I had students tell me which parts were most important and needed to be included in our notes – helping them develop their note-taking skills which are beneficial for studying. And, I was amazed at the connections students were able to make with the questions I posed. For example, I asked them to compare the lifestyle of this civilization to the other civilizations they have studied and many students had very specific examples to offer. Something I had thought of since the last lesson was making the assignment part of my lesson fit into the time spent in class on Socials. So, previously in my unit plan I had planned to have the students make prezi presentations. However, because the next couple of lessons also have pretty big projects, I decided to make this lesson just for this block. As a result, I ended up introducing the concept of graphic organizers. I always try to link my teaching to previous days and lessons because I feel like this sort of establishes purpose and connections, making the learning that much more meaningful for the students. So, I reminded students of their planning for the settlement letters last week and how this graphic organizer, was again a way to organize their thoughts just in a little bit of a different representation. By changing to the graphic organizer, students were listing reasons for the decline of the civilization and then they had to offer their own explanations. I emphasized the importance of the latter as it would be the part which told me they understood how different factors – like climate – affect civilizations. The class was able to understand it in class and fill out most of it in class, leaving only a little they could complete for homework.

For this week, I would like to continue to work on my wait-time and pacing. And something both my s.a. and I have noticed is that as I teach and the lesson moves along, I get better at this. It’s funny because some of this has to do with the fact that I’m so excited to teach my lessons that I want to get through it all. Which is why I have been making some changes so that there is enough time for the most important aspects. However, I plan to be consciously aware of my wait-time. Even when I have them think in pairs and then report out. When I ask them to report-out, it is really important to have enough wait-time there as well. Also, I would like to try using a different method of having questions answered, by choosing students. However, I would like to frame this positively. Maybe something along the lines of “I want to hear from all of you, because everyone’s thoughts and ideas are important, so today I am going to go around the class, randomly choosing names to participate!” This will be good learning for me as a teacher!