Week 8- October 4-8, 2010 and Inquiry

This week at my PDS, I have taken over everything in the classroom except for Math Workshop which I will take over next week. It feels nice to have a lot of responsibility in the classroom and truly put to practice the important things I have learned in my four years of college. I also feel that my teaching went more smoothly this week and I relied on my mentor teacher less to help me. I still ask her a lot of questions because I know that she still has to have input into her classroom since I will not be there the whole year. She provides me with important and valuable information and helps me brainstorm new ideas. I am learning that you must be flexible-especially in the Kindergarten classroom- because you never know what can happen. For instance, on Thursday, in morning circle and student got sick while we were standing to have a “wiggle break”. I sent him to my mentor teacher and I stayed at the front of the class with the other students to keep them on task. I was so grateful that my mentor teacher was there because I still don’t know how I will handle throw-up. It made me realize that I have to think on my toes because there will not be someone else in the room to take care of things if something like this would happen in the future.

I completed my first official Missing Number activity during Math Workshop time with individual students. It went well and students who had scored low on the mClass Math assessment actually did a good job figuring out the flashcards (some students had to be prompted however.) I only called individual students but next week, when I use Missing Number Bingo, I am going to call small groups of about three students. I think this will be good for students to play as a group and each student will have their own BINGO card. I will be anxious to see how students respond to this activity and being in a group. I also want to see if as the activities go on, students begin to conceptually understand missing numbers and the processes used to figure out the number. My mentor teacher found a TechSteps lesson about missing numbers and letters and I am going to teach it next Tuesday as a supplementary activity to the ones that I am already conducting during Math Workshop.