8P29 Post 7

Anonymous. "Teacher Lesson Plan Ecard." Retrieved from
http://www.teachjunkie.com/filing-cabinet/teaching-realities/
NOTE: This is not what happened to me when working on my
lesson plan haha!

           It’s getting to be an exciting time in teacher’s college because we’re starting to ramp up to actually teaching lessons to students! Woo! All the foundation work in every class, not just 8P29, is finally going to be applied and put to a practical use.

This week I worked on my first draft of the math lesson plan we’re have to complete. I actually had a lot of fun doing it, and have ideas for how to create follow up lessons to start creating a unit. It was not without its difficulties though. I decided to make my lesson as practical as possible, so I tailored it for the students in my placement (a grade 4/5 split). I was initially stumped because I wasn’t sure how to create activities that didn’t dumb things down for the grade 5s but wouldn’t be alienating for the grade 4s. Luckily the topic of my lesson (introduction to telling time) has associated learning expectations that are similar. The only difference between the time expectations for grade 4 and 5 is that grade 4s need to identify time on a clock down to a minute, and grade 5s need to be able to identify seconds as well. Within the direct instruction portion of the lesson, I can still teach all the students the same things, but then ask the grade 5 students of the class some more complicated questions about calculating time. Grade 4s can feel free to answer but precedence is on a grade 5 answering the question correctly. We’ll see how that actually works in practice, but in theory it should turn out alright!

I can tell that 8P29 is rubbing off on me because during my lesson plan, I automatically started thinking of multiple strategies students could use to work on their homework problems, which is not a level of reflection I had at the start of the year. Visual aids and manipulatives never really helped me that much in math when I was a child, so I wasn’t in the habit of thinking about using or talking about those methods, but now it is becoming part of my automatic brainstorming about activities to try to incorporate those elements into lessons **when possible**.

On the topic of manipulatives and visual aids in math, one suggestion from the textbook I enjoyed the most this week was using balance scales and paper bags to help students visualize balancing equations in the patterning and algebra unit. Using this method, I feel like students of many ages and abilities could grasp how approach finding x in a problem because it shows the direct consequence of what happens when you don’t balance the equation (literally!).

I wouldn’t mind testing out this method on my friend’s 8-year-old daughter, as the last time she was over, once she finished her place value homework, she expressed an interest in figuring out linear algebra problems (isn’t it amazing how children natural want to know things and challenge themselves?). She was able to grasp a fairly straightforward question (n +5 = 7) by counting that 7 is 2 more than 5, so n is 2. But when she asked for a harder one, I gave her n + 4 =11-3, and she was having a bit of trouble understanding balancing. I think with the scales and paper bags this would be much more evident for her.

There’s so much more I want to talk about; I’ve found this course inspired my creativity, something I honestly didn’t think would happen with teaching math, but I’ll leave it at this for now.