I am laughing my head off now that I actually thought I would have the time or motivation to update this blog every single day of my 2 week teaching solo. Yeah, that didn't happen.
I was way too busy, especially since I still had my own classes from 4-6:30 most days and lots of my own homework assignments.
That being said, my solo went great! The whole thing ran really smoothly with no major hiccups of any kind. I had a honeymoon period with the kids for 3 days. Then on the 4th day, boundaries started being tested and my kids very much wanted to be holy terrors. But I cracked down on them by really enforcing the procedures (for instance sending the whole class right back outside again after a few students came into the classroom screaming), and they were all pretty well behaved again for the rest of the solo.
I did get some pictures from my solo time, and of course still remember mostly everything, so even though I missed out on blogging every day, I will be updating the blog with some stories of my solo in the next while.
For starters, I will be going over some lessons I learned over the course of the solo.
Lesson 1. Pre-test/Post-test/Pre-test/Post-test Always know where your kids are at!
I spent the first week of my solo reviewing previously learned math concepts at the request of my master teacher, in order to get the class ready for the Math Benchmark that the students took on Day 6 of my solo.
Because last quarter I was only in the classroom full-time on Mondays and Tuesdays, I didn't have the best understanding of what the class had accomplished in math. On the first day of review, I made the mistake of completely just relying on what my master teacher said about the understanding of the students instead of pretesting and determining that for myself.
So I rolled out with a great lesson on the sum of angles in triangles and quadrilaterals that I thought was awesome (because it included problem solving and conceptual understanding activities and succinctly summarized the whole standard in one lesson), only to discover in the first 5 minutes of the lesson that my class didn't remember ANYTHING on the topic and that the lesson was way over their heads. Of course this was also the lesson that my supervisor was observing me! Oh boy!
Well, everything ended up ok. I scrapped some things and took about 10 steps back on the fly, and improvised an extra 15 minutes into the lesson in order to really have the time to rehash the concepts and bring the class up to speed. Math went all the way to recess, completely skipping over the 15 minute Read-Aloud I had planned, but in the end we finished the lesson with the class having accomplished everything I meant them to do initially.
But I did learn my lesson! The next day, I came prepared with a second lesson on the same topic, but this time I also had two assessments. Right as the class came in for the day, I gave them a 4 item pre-test in order to determine exactly what they had gotten out of the lesson the day before. Then, when the class was at science (my prep period), I graded and looked at these tests and then adjusted my math lesson based on the misconceptions some students showed. Then I taught my lesson, and afterwards gave another 5 item post-test, to see if the lesson had been successful.
I'm not going to lie, I am still pretty proud of myself over that lesson! I feel like I really did everything that a real teacher does. Its really nice to hear about something in school and then to actually apply it.
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