Ninth Week

During this week, the fifth grade team taught our third lesson study.  The lesson study went really well, with the exception of a few questions that we had and brought up during our de-briefing.  Angie and Mr. Bishop helped us tremendously in figuring our exactly what was missing from our lesson study.  While I felt overwhelmed at the amount of information that we were receiving, I am also glad that we received it.  The de-briefing session helps make the lesson a great one instead of a mediocre one.  For this reason, I am excited to teach the last lesson next week, however, I am also nervous to do so.  There are a lot of expectations for my partner and me to do a perfect job on the last lesson, so I hope that we can live up to this expectation.  I feel good about it for the most part, especially because I taught it once already, and even though there was a different focus in the lesson, I nonetheless have experience teaching the topic to a class of fifth graders.

This week, my partner and I began teaching the social studies unit that is expected of us to complete for Kevin Berry's class.  We embarked on somewhat of an adventure with out students.  We are beginning a chapter on Florida becoming a part of the US and on its way to becoming a state.  Our students use an exceptionally old social studies textbook, where Jeb Bush is still governor of Florida, which provides them with a lot of dry reading.  Therefore, we wanted to create a more exciting atmosphere during social studies.  About five of the kids also stated that social studies was their least favorite subject, so we wanted to get them engaged in the history, not just read about it.  For this reason, we decided that for the first lesson, students would read and receive instruction from us on the topic, but proceed to write their own plays and act them out based on information that they learned and understood.  We are doing this lesson with our fourth graders who are all gifted and were exceptionally excited about this opportunity.  They were even talking about their characters and what they planned to do in their plays during lunch.  I was very happy to hear them debating over what event should go where and who should say what.  I am also excited to see how students will work together, as we have them in groups, and how the plays will turn out.

Lastly, the FCAT is fast approaching and our teacher asked us to help her out in planning her math lessons all the way up until the day of FCAT.  This was the first time that we actually sat down to help her plan the lessons.  We have sat with her and discussed lessons that we have to teach for our college classes, but this was the first time that she asked us directly to help her with her own schedule.  She also treated the lessons as something that the three of us will tackle together and asked us to help her teach the lessons, especially because she will be teaching math twice a day in order to teach students all the necessary material.  I was very glad that she asked us for help and actually took our advice in planning the schedule.  Now I feel as though I have an idea of what is coming up and what lessons to expect, which will help me plan to teach them as well.