Day 31: Math and Orientation

We handed out a worksheet of multiplication problems to the 4th grade today. They were mostly double by double problems and quite a few multiplying by 10's. I was surprised at how many students didn't understand why or how it worked. Every single student got 14 x 15 wrong. They didn't even know how to get started on how to solve it. For me, it was very frustrating. Especially since this is a skill normally learned in 3rd grade in the United States.

I have also realized that in my classroom I want it to be as student oriented as possible. I want the students to be able to help themselves as much as possible. If that means getting their own counters to help with a problem or finding a pencil. My students need to know where everything is and know when they can use things. 

I realized today when a student sat with her hand raised for 5 minutes just to get some dice, that I needed my students to be independent. The teacher said she could have got the dice herself, but the girl didn't know that. Every time previously she had had dice given to her. I want my students to learn independence. 

Day 24: Genes or Jeans?

Heredity... is not an easy thing to teach. And I need to discover a way to make it more interesting. I planned for a bunch of stuff today, took some out, and now I realize that I need to take out even more! We didn't get to half of the vocab words that I wanted to get to today. Maybe I should just have them up and they kids write them down at the beginning. Then mark everytime we use the words in our discussions. That may be a much better idea than what I was doing. I think I will try that tomorrow.

Mrs. Burton left the classroom during math today without telling me, on purpose. She wanted to see how I would handle the classroom. Overall I thought it went well, the noise level was good, the kids all got their work done. I didn't do a very good job of looking over the class as I was helping individual kids, but I can get better at that.

A pretty good day today, I learned that having too much to teach is better than too little, so long as you can prioritize.

Things to do my first year:

Decide how much noise I want in my room

If I am going to do transitions to music, what songs am I going to choose? Will it depend on the grade I am in?