So Week 5 has come and gone… and nothing horribly exciting has happened. Miss Evans, who is the student teacher in our room, has taken over most subjects, but not Social Studies. That means that I get to see math from a different perspective. It’s interesting to watch her think of new and exciting ways to teach the more mundane aspects of math. We used tangrams to work on everyday shapes and some more obscure shapes (rhombuses, for example).
This was very interesting for me because I really don’t remember learning about rhombuses and trapezoids until 5th or 6th grade when we started doing geometry. We also used templates to trace shapes, but this proved slightly disastrous. The students were putting fingers or pencils in the circle shape and spinning the templates around until they went flying across the room or, even worse, into their neighbor. There were several templates that I ended up taking away because students were not listening when warned to stop…
This week the students were able to get outside for recess, and there was a visible difference in them because of it. They were much calmer after having run off all of their pent-up energy. I also think it would be a good idea to have students get up and stretch when the teacher notices they’re getting restless. Since it is the winter season and students are stuck inside all of the time, sometimes they just need a way to let out their energy, even if it is just having the students do a few jumping jacks or run in place for 30 seconds.
When I told Miss Evans that I wouldn’t be there for the next 2 weeks, she said how much easier it is to teach the Everyday Math series with an extra set of hands, mostly because of all the tools that need to be passed out. The next 3 weeks will be teaching-free, since I have 2 weeks of spring break and then they have a week off. Hopefully I can catch up on sleep!
