April 16, 2008 at 8:31 pm (Uncategorized)
Friday was Melrose’s Carnival – very similar to Family Fun Night at my elementary school. I worked the redemption center, where students could cash in their winnings and get prizes.
As soon as students walked in they could buy tickets, which were the way of gaining entry into playing a game (although tickets could also be cashed in for some prizes). Then students were given a card that had a grid on it, which they wore around their neck. Students were given stamps on their cards for winning games, and those stamps were then cashed in for prizes. There were also raffles that all of the students’ names had been entered into and raffle tickets that parents could buy for baskets that each class had put together.
It was fun to see not only my students, but different grades and even families walking around and enjoying themselves. My students seemed to really enjoy seeing me there and would run up to me and show me how many stamps they had, what prizes they had received, etc. I thought it was good that rooms were divided by grade (for example, there were two rooms for the lollipop draw, one that was K-3 and one that was 4-6) because there is a huge maturity difference between my first graders and the sixth graders! Overall though, it seemed like everyone had a good time, including everyone who was staffing the rooms!
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April 16, 2008 at 8:19 pm (Uncategorized)
This week was a little crazy because students were excited for the Melrose Carnival, which was on Friday. However, we did manage to get a lot accomplished during the week.
I taught a lesson with the number grids and we analyzed the grid to see what patterns we could find (moving left to right was either adding or subtracting by ones, but moving up or down was either adding or subtracting by tens). I then had them write answers to addition or subtraction problems on white boards as I said them out loud. The problems were either adding or subtracting some multiple of ten, and as they got better they had to think of the answers in their head without looking at their number grid. This caused some issues, but overall it went well.
In Social Studies we started “visiting” Australia and the students were excited to learn how different objects were called different names in Australia (a friend is called “mate”, and cookie is called “biscuit”). We had issues with one student in particular showing high levels of aggression; he tried stabbing me with a pencil, tried hitting Angela, and he threw pencils at the girl who sits across from him. He was sent down to the principal’s office after class, but it made me think because it we were able to keep the class under control but there were four teachers there, I can’t imagine trying to handle it alone! It makes me think that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to classroom management…
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April 4, 2008 at 11:10 pm (Uncategorized)
This was my first week back from spring break and the student’s first week back as well, so everything was a little crazy this week!
On Monday we worked on Everyday Math using flats (100s), longs (10s) and cubes (1s). This helps the students to visualize larger numbers, but unfortunately there were not enough pieces for all of the students. Each student was supposed to have a bag with a certain number of each piece, but many students were missing parts, which made the activity difficult and created arguments between the students. Wednesday we worked with making change when buying items. Students looked at a page in their book that had pictures of objects and their prices and the students paired up and used coins to buy items and make change. Unfortunately, the lesson had been “If a shell costs $0.47 and I give $0.50, how much change will I get?” and the students did not understand why they would not just give $0.47 if that is how much the shell cost. Using money also created issues because they would give someone else money to “buy” the object and get change back, but once again they are supposed to have a specific amount of money and trading messed up their amounts.
On Thursday I taught a Math lesson introducing the concept of fractions. We did one whole, halves, thirds and fourths using “crackers” that we cut out of paper. We talked about how many EQUAL pieces I would need to break my cracker into if I wanted to share it fairly with one friend (or two friends, etc)
The lesson went well, but then we had a workbook page on “What’s My Rule?” boxes (that we’ve done HUNDREDS of times before), but this one used money for the first time. Instead of saying the rule is +10 and the finding outputs based on inputs such as:
students had rules like +$0.10 and they had inputs such as $0.07. Most students would then write 17 in the output box, instead of $0.17, so these ended up being a whole class activity instead of individual work. I also did not think of the fact that Miss Evans and Miss Rogers would not be there, and it is hard to stop and talk to and answer 25 students’ questions on your own.
Overall this week went well considering it is the first week back. I can’t believe I only have two more weeks there. It’s going by so quickly!
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