A rather irregular week...
That's the best way I can describe this week because it was not your ordinary week. For starters we didn't have school on Monday, as it was our last day of our Spring/Easter break. I really appreciate having the Monday after Easter off, and I am going to miss this day next year (next year we have a separate week dedicated to Spring Break, so we won't have a longer break around Easter). So that led to our week starting on Tuesday, and the threat of SNOW was already imminent. Last time I checked, it was supposed to be, "April showers bring May flowers." What does April snow bring? Kids who seemingly have never seen snow before and HAVE to point it out when they spot it out the window. All joking aside, Tuesday was actually a pretty good day, and the students weren't bad because the snow didn't start until the later part of the day. What DID stink, however, was having bus duty at the end of the day and being pelted with icy snowflakes...
So, that snow that we ended up getting resulted in a 2 hour day yesterday, which meant a rather short school day when you take into account our early release that we have on Wednesdays. Throw in the fact that on Wednesdays my students have library and gym, and that led to me spending more time seeing my colleagues yesterday than my students.
Which brings us to today. We had a rough morning today.The kids had a lot of energy today and seemed to be lacking the ability to use their ears more than their mouths. With this excess amount of energy, I thought it would be good to rearrange some lesson plans a bit and bring in some hands-on activities during our learning. We made some cloud models with cotton balls, but malfunctions in listening caused it to take longer than I had hoped. While working on practicing our 8s multiplication facts, I was showing the students a strategy they could use if struggling with remembering the 8s facts by using their doubling skills. Say you wanted to do 3x8: if you double the 3 3 times (6, 12, 24), you will end up with your total. I wanted to have the students physically show the process, so I pulled out some small cubes to use as manipulatives. After explaining the expectations that we would be using the cubes to show the numbers we were working with and not work on our Minecraft building skills, I handed out the cubes in small piles. Nevertheless, there were still some difficulties in carrying out the expectations, so a handful of students had to turn in their cubes and show the process by drawing the amounts. Thinking about it over lunch, I thought it would have been better if I had provided the expectations and then offered the option of either using the cubes or drawing it out. Our afternoon was a bit better than the morning, so that was helpful.
Here's to hoping that tomorrow is more like this afternoon than this morning...
Mindfulness thought for the week: Be the change you want to see in the world. --Ghandi
So, that snow that we ended up getting resulted in a 2 hour day yesterday, which meant a rather short school day when you take into account our early release that we have on Wednesdays. Throw in the fact that on Wednesdays my students have library and gym, and that led to me spending more time seeing my colleagues yesterday than my students.
Which brings us to today. We had a rough morning today.The kids had a lot of energy today and seemed to be lacking the ability to use their ears more than their mouths. With this excess amount of energy, I thought it would be good to rearrange some lesson plans a bit and bring in some hands-on activities during our learning. We made some cloud models with cotton balls, but malfunctions in listening caused it to take longer than I had hoped. While working on practicing our 8s multiplication facts, I was showing the students a strategy they could use if struggling with remembering the 8s facts by using their doubling skills. Say you wanted to do 3x8: if you double the 3 3 times (6, 12, 24), you will end up with your total. I wanted to have the students physically show the process, so I pulled out some small cubes to use as manipulatives. After explaining the expectations that we would be using the cubes to show the numbers we were working with and not work on our Minecraft building skills, I handed out the cubes in small piles. Nevertheless, there were still some difficulties in carrying out the expectations, so a handful of students had to turn in their cubes and show the process by drawing the amounts. Thinking about it over lunch, I thought it would have been better if I had provided the expectations and then offered the option of either using the cubes or drawing it out. Our afternoon was a bit better than the morning, so that was helpful.
Here's to hoping that tomorrow is more like this afternoon than this morning...
Mindfulness thought for the week: Be the change you want to see in the world. --Ghandi
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