Oh the joys of observations!

Those of us ECE Block 3 students who are assigned to Whitehead Road Elementary and Oglethorpe Avenue Elementary are supposed to schedule observations via the calendar on elc with a lady named Missy Jersawitz. She is not our EDEC teacher but is somehow connected to our program. I honestly do not even know what her exact position is! haha Anyways, she comes to our 2 schools and observes us, and our actual EDEC teacher, Janna Dresden, observes those of us who are placed at JJ Harris Elementary and Fowler Drive Elementary. As I may have mentioned before, I am at Whitehead Road Elementary again this semester and LOVE it!

Last week in my 2nd grade classroom, I taught a review math lesson on fractions to the students and had scheduled for Missy to come observe me. Of course I was super nervous and was worried my students would behave badly or something in general would go wrong. The observation for scheduled for 10:30 and I was so ready to get it over with! My mentor teacher had already mentioned to the class that a visitor was coming so they should be on their best behavior. I had my fingers crossed that they would!

After recess, it was time for Missy to come and for me to begin the final review lesson in the fraction unit. I actually was somewhat confident because during our full week in the field, I taught the opening fraction review lesson, which was what they should have learned in first grade. My lesson this time began with a card matching game with fraction pictures and words. This opening part of the lesson went really well and I had great control of the class. The next part of the lesson I taught from the Smartboard and I had the students volunteer to come up and solve the problems. This was a good way to engage students, but I did notice that the students that were still in their desks and not answering the problem at the board would get slightly unfocused. Next, I passed out baggies of foam shapes including hexagons, trapezoids, triangles, and rhombuses. The student used these shapes with a partner to help figure out the fraction questions on the board. I thought this part of the lesson went great as well, but naturally, the students started getting a little too loud and began to play with the shapes. The lesson unfortunately started going downhill from here. As I moved on towards the end of the lesson, I forgot to tell the students to put the shapes up so they were very loud and unfocused at this point. I kept having to get on to them and Missy could see that I was getting extremely frustrated.

After the lesson, I met with Missy and she told me, to my surprise, that she thought the fraction lesson went very well. She said she noticed how frustrated I got and that I should have just stopped, gotten my thoughts together, gotten the shapes from the students, and THEN moved on once I gained control of the class again. She gave me more helpful feedback and it all went much better than I thought! :) This Thursday Missy is coming to observe me for my 2nd and final observation and I will be teaching a guided reading lesson with the low level group. I have worked with these students before and have done guided reading lessons with them before, so I feel pretty confident! Wish me luck! :)

P.S. Sorry this blog post ended up being very long.....I didn't realize how much I was typing! :)