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!
ahargleroad09 said,
April 5, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Even though this week had some class management mishaps, it seems like nothing was ever too out of control, and you were able to get things back on track relatively quickly. I think that having experiences like that are good, because it gives you the opportunity to learn from them so you are better prepared when both planning and teaching lessons. Sometimes things you never even thought about happen, and having experiences when things go awry help you to think of what to do when those “what-if” moments occur.