Preparing my lesson plans I went over what was required with my teacher I sat down and I cranked them out, trying my best to think about how much we covered in a given day. The hardest part about writing my lesson plan was the fact that they had taken a pre-test on the day before and I would be trying to teach the students with no knowledge to what they knew or didn’t know. Tuesday’s class was interesting; I had no idea how fast the students would understand the concept or how much they would already know. I had prepared some things that would need to be cut out and glued and I had a worksheet that the students would be required to work on. When I started teaching I realized that everything I was teaching the students seemed to get really quickly as I handed out the worksheet for them to work on I realized that they would soon be done and I would still have 30 minutes of class that I needed to fill with activities. I scrambled trying to decide what to do. I ended up creating problems and having students come forwards to show how they got their answers. Everything ended up finishing well but I knew that I needed to plan more activates for the following day.
Wednesday I ended up using everything I had planned for Wednesday and using some of the stuff I had planned for Friday as well. This class we also used manipulative. I was slightly worried that the students would get out of control and would be crazy however I knew the importance of hands on activates so I figured that it was important to try and incorporate another thing that I decided to use on Wednesday was assessment so that I could tell where the students were with understanding the topic. The class was slightly louder then normal and had a lot more energy but overall Wednesday’s class went really well and the students seemed to be able to enjoy themselves and learn the subject better.
Thursday for math we don’t switch and so I have students of all levels. Mrs. Zadel and I both agreed that this would be a great time for students to work on fundamentals in math so that at higher levels the students wouldn’t struggle as much. This class was a challenging class; we were trying to help the students get more confident in their ability to do double digit multiplication. I assumed that the students already knew how to multiply and spent a very small portion of the class going over the process and I had planned the majority of the class as time to get practice. However what I didn’t realize was that the majority of the class needed a lot of time spent on getting the process down. I spent the most of the time rushing around the classroom working with different small groups trying to help everyone understand what was being taught. It was an important lesson I just assumed that the students knew more then they did.
Friday’s class went really well, something nice about Fridays is that we have netbooks, which allow students to have another way to grasp the concept being taught as well as having a fun way to learn. Before netbooks we spent sometime reviewing and then I had several websites that the students could visit and play different games. Part of me doesn’t like the netbooks because I feel as though its an easy way out but a lot of me thinks its great that the students have another way to learn the stuff and can have fun and still do math.
Overall throughout the week I learned several key points the biggest thing I learned is that I need to be able to try and plan out and write out my plans better. In my head I have plans but I don’t think about all the logistics that are required. Another thing is that one-day I will be required to write lesson plans and be evaluated by my peers or my principle. I don’t think its possible to be overly detailed when it comes to something like a unit plan. You have to be able to realize that there is a unit plan to use as a reference but you are not required to follow it completely if things are working well then don’t try and move on just because your unit plan says to. When I look back and evaluated everything I realize that overall it was well done, the students were able to get to where they needed to. They were ready to move on to the next topic and they had a deep grasp on what was being taught. There were several days that seemed frantic and I didn’t have enough information planned but the students were able to grasp everything they had to. When I assigned a quiz the majority of the students understood and preformed well which was encouraging after looking at the pre-assessments that were completed.