This week was different and exciting because we acquired a
new student! The students seemed to be very active all week and had a lot of
energy. This made the week pretty challenging actually. We started doing statewide testing from Mon-Wed. I liked to see how the students reacted and felt about it. Most students were
indifferent. I think they were even excited to do it because it was something
new and they got to use laptops and be in a different classroom.
The second and
most absolutely cool thing we did is use the technology “Dash & Dot”
robots. Instead of doing our regular math lesson and a game/worksheet. We had a
paper we filled out as we used the robots to make it move forward a certain
number of centimeters based on the math equation. For example, one problem
said, if I start at 10 cm and end at 30 cm, how many cm did I travel? So the
students needed to solve the problem then “code” the robot to travel the
distance. It was really cool! The students were so excited and were able to
practice their learning. We had the rooms divided into stations so while our
co-teacher was doing that part, one group was practicing coding on the chrome
books, and the other group was in the hall with my partner and I practicing a
converted Yahtzee game of place value. Then the stations rotated so everyone
had a chance to try everything. I found it challenging to explain the rules of
Yahtzee to all the students in our groups because they were in the hall and not
really wanting to pay attention at first. However, they listened and were able
to play with help from my partner and I. We were noting with our co-teacher how
often it is that our group of high achieving students are the ones with the
most behavior problems and the group that does the least amount of work. My
co-teacher thinks it’s because they are used to having the answers just come to
them and don’t want to work hard at new things. She doesn’t let them get away
with it though, she is always challenging them with new lessons that work on 3rd
grade problems (they are 2nd grade). We have a cluster classroom, so
about 1/3 – ½ of the class are the high achieving students within 2nd
grade.
Overall, it
has been an exciting week getting to delve into some of the topics further and
really understand how the personality of each student affects the needs they
have when they learn. My co-teacher makes the job look easy of providing for
every student, but I know it is way harder than it looks!
I think that it's great that you got to see your CT make a lesson with "Dash and Dot" I would really like to use something like that in my future classroom. I think that if learning seems fun you don't even realize you are learning. The idea of a cluster classroom sounds interesting. What a great experience being a part of this type of classroom.
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