First Lesson!

The first lesson is always the hardest to teach, in my experience so far. It's difficult to know how engaged the children will be, how to get back in the swing of adapting to the children's needs, etc. Friday morning (March 16th) was our first lesson and I think it actually went pretty well for a first lesson! Maybe I'm blind to the mistakes we made, but the students seemed to stay pretty focused and the instructor commended us on our work!

The lesson began with me leading an interactive reading of Caps For Sale, a book about a man who sells caps and then when he falls asleep, monkeys steal his caps. Normally, a reader would not think of economics in relation to this book, but I thought it was a great introduction for Kindergarteners into the world of money and exchange of goods for money. The students really enjoyed the book, imitating the monkeys and their little motions and sound effects "tsz, tsz, tsz" and they seemed to be able to answer questions about why the peddler in the book needed to sell his caps.
Next, Lorena introduced the activity section where students had paper tickets with toys on them, labeled with their prices, and each student also had cut out papers displaying the 4 coins. In a simple way, each student could buy two items, turn in their money to the helper at their station, check off the box on their worksheet, and at the end, check off the boxes for coins they had remaining. This was really adapted to our particular class because some students knew exactly how much money they had spent and how much they had left, but some students did not know the value of the coins and so they could at least identify which coins they had left.

The biggest uh-oh of the whole lesson was the wrap-up. We completely forgot to tie it all together at the end, which I know is key to student understanding. OOPS! I hope next time we'll get it right. Lesson #2 comes tomorrow...

Third Observation

During the third observation, I was again frustrated while watching the students, but this time I just felt bad for the teacher. She said in 30 years of teaching, she has never had a class NOT respond to her the way this class does. All of her strategies that normally work with kindergarten children have not worked this year, and she was just telling me how amazed she is that there are children in her class who STILL do not even register that she is speaking to them. She said the variety of ability levels is so widespread that she basically has to plan about 10 different lessons to teach the same thing, in order to reach each student.

Frankly, this is overwhelming and scary to me as a future teacher. I'm not looking forward to doing 10x the work like that! How exhausting to go back day after day and face these children who do not respond at all to what you say as their teacher!

As for me right now, however, I still have to keep all of this in mind when teaching lessons for EDIS 488. On the day of observation #3, March 2nd, my teaching partner and I also administered our pre-assessment. We created three stations for students to rotate to: 1) guided exploration of money to determine student knowledge 2) independent work- drawing jobs in the community 3) needs/wants comparison with guidance. As the students rotated through the stations, I did notice that they were engaged in the material and interested about the subject: economics. This is encouraging for our unit teaching! I was at the money station and about 90-95% of students could identify a penny and its value, and about 1/3 of the students knew the rest of the coins. All students could count out 10 pennies, which I was impressed by, and the kids commented that they liked "playing" with the money. We'll see how the unit goes....