Week 10-October 18th-22nd, 2010 and Inquiry

This week at my PDS went very smooth. I am very excited to be teaching full-time in the classroom. I am working on engaging the students in the morning routine. This is a skill that my teacher and I had discussed last week. It is hard to keep Kindergarten students attention for a long period of time and I have been working on not asking too many questions (sticking to the basics) and moving through the lesson at an appropriate pace. My teacher stated that I am improving in this area. When I notice that I am “losing” students’ attention, I wrap up and move on to the next topic. This is a skill that my mentor teacher also talked to me about. She stated that this is the best way to try and keep students engaged in a lesson. I started using new Math lessons this week on the computer. I project them on a white screen in the front of the classroom for students to see. My mentor teacher and I have been working on tweaking this routine all week. The students are easily distracted by the projector and want to make shadow puppets. We have started having some student sit in chairs around the circle and some students sit on the floor. It has seemed to work so far. The topic of 1 more, 2 more is difficult for students to master so I had to teach it two days. It was a “teaching moment” for me when I realized that I needed to go back and re-teach. I approached the topic differently and used students as models. I could see that more students understood after the second day of instruction.

Inquiry: I starting implementing a new note card system this week to keep track of my anecdotal notes, which are my main source of data for my Inquiry project. I have a note card now for each student for each activity/game that I conduct in the classroom. This will hopefully allow me to write more notes on each student and keep the notes more organized. I am working on finishing up the third activity-Missing Number BINGO. Next week, I will begin the fourth activity- Missing Numbers, OH NO! (Board game for students to play.) I am working on observing how student’s understandings are progressing as the weeks go along. I can see an increase in understanding with each activity for some students, while other students stay the same or do not understand at all. I am anxious to go over my anecdotal notes/record at the end of my study and really analyze students’ thinking.