Wow,
keeping up with a blog is harder than I thought! But it is cool to be able to
look back and see how I felt during the first few weeks of school and what my
responsibilities were like. Since then, I’ve made numerous lesson plans for
social studies, science, math, health, reading, and language arts; I’ve lead a
few small groups; and I feel pretty well integrated into my school’s community.
Wow, I can’t believe the classroom will be my own next semester. That’s kind of
scary, but mostly exciting.
But let’s
pull it back to math. Math, math, math, I do like it quite a bit! Let’s see, I
created approximately four or five lesson plans for math during this semester.
And while on lesson plan number three it hit me that the way I was teaching these
big lessons was not authentic (I mean, they were straight out of the text book,
take these notes down, make sure you know this, etc.) . I was shocked. Of
course, it was quite obvious that it was not an authentic way of learning when
I took a step back, but I was so busy and focused on completing my intern
responsibilities that I never took that step back. But I truly am grateful that
I caught it, however late in the game it was. When I noticed my mistake, I
scrambled thinking to myself, “Okay, how can I make these angles mean something
to my students?” Yes, I could have had them use straws to make angles, but I wanted
to connect it back to their life experience or prior knowledge-I wanted it to
truly mean something because I wanted my students to love math and see that it was
useful!!!
Finally
it hit me. The answer lay in time! Yes, that was it! My students had, earlier
in the year, been studying how time elapsed (and they had actually had a pretty
hard time with it). Now if I could have them look at acute, right, obtuse, and
straight angles…could I ask them to make those same angles on their clocks?
Well, it was worth a shot.
So we
got into the lesson the next day and after I had my students read their
objective out loud and copy a few notes, I finally unveiled the authentic
activity of making angles with clocks. And it was a great success! Not only did
my students get to review time, but they also got to engage in the practice of
creating and understanding these new angles. They were thoroughly engaged and I
think everyone was pretty excited about the content connections.
Moral
of the story: it is never, ever too late or not worth the time to incorporate
authentic activities into your lesson plans. Make the effort and, who knows,
you and your students might be really glad that you did!
