My First Real Lesson

Friday, May 15, 2009: Volcanoes, 3rd grade, Kelly Swartzentruber's class at McKinley Elementary.

My son said that if he were to score me, on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best lesson he's ever had), I would get a 9.5... just goes to show how much he loves me, not really how good the lesson was.

Anyway, there were several things that became very clear as I was *teaching.* The first was that everything takes twice as long as you expect it to. I thought my lesson would be about an hour long... it was almost 2!! The second is that it is quite possible to overthink what you are doing. I was trying to be so conscientious about calling on everyone equally, that I took rather a long time to choose students.

Kelly was so gracious. She did some conflict management for me . . . as I realized one of the drawbacks of group work: some kids just can't let go of control (in fact, I might have been one of those kids in elementary school) and if you have two of them in a group together, look out!

The students did learn and I think they had fun doing it. I will have the opportunity next week (May 18, 19, or 20) to do the lesson again in the other 3rd grade classroom at McKinley. I will try not to be so nervous and to refine my technique a bit by then.

Smartboards (Promethean Boards) Are Amazing!

Wow! Tom, Nick, and I really enjoyed our adventure to St. Paul where Chris was kind enough to demonstrate some of the exciting things that you can do with a "Smartboard." Chris teaches high school math and so he was demonstrating some of the functions that are especially useful to him. However, I am already thinking up different ways that a Smartboard could be especially helpful in teaching ELL students, as well as doing collaborative writing projects with middle school English students, and mulling applications that would assist students with reading difficulties.

Currently, I am working on my SIOP lesson plans and I was thinking about how much fun it would be to have a Smartboard for my volcanoes lessons.... This piece of equipment would be useful and fun to have in the classroom.

Watch our videos introducing & showing off some of the features of Chris'
Promethean Board:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GCY2JCOukE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMKgzi8MbY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koojRSma4P0