Alright, today was our first day of intersession and my first day of teaching--what a rush! It was so exciting to be actually setting up the classroom and prepping for our students to come in. I had been nervous this past week that I would be so tired of looking at my lesson plan, but last night I couldn't sleep from excitement! During the course of the morning, I was so glad to have added more detail and descriptions to our lesson plan this past week. It comforted me to have a plan as to what the day would entail--even though it didn't go quite as we imagined it would. There were certain activities within the lesson plan that took longer than we had expected. Creating our coat of arms for the realms took quite a long time and the students didn't finish them. I think a bit more structure in the creation would have made it easier for them--they could have benefited from a set outline from which they created their crests. This illustrated to me the need to provide choice and a sense of agency but also the need to provide some scaffold in order to move the process along more smoothly. Because this took so long, we had to cut down on our reading time, but, the reading went really well!
After looking at our Intro to Fairy Tales powerpoint (which they all loved) we generated a really great list of ingredients on the wall. With this list we created symbols for each ingredient as a class. Next I read "Rumpelstiltskin" out loud and the students followed along on their own copy. After each paragraph we would stop and I would ask them what happened in the paragraph--or, what could we mark. Everyone was following along and participating. I only saw a couple of students who weren't keeping up as well, but even one of them really stepped up when we talked about the morals of the story. I was surprised at how well they were able to pick up on the morals both on their own and with some prompts from us.
The word castle was another hit within the class and the kids enjoyed a little game at the end. It was during the game that two of the most distant students opened up. One boy who tried to get out of the game on purpose through lack of any kind of effort, ended up winning the game and celebrating his victory (after we called him out on trying on purpose to get out). It seemed like he needed a little push and to feel more confidence in his abilities--where have I heard this before.
For tomorrow, I think that we can work on scaffolding even more, making sure that students aren't talking out of place, and being careful not to try ant talk over or interrupt each other. These were things that I noticed as well as things that were mentioned by the students in their reflection note cards. We asked them what worked about the class, what they could do better, and what we could do better. All around the kids said they had fun and that they could listen and focus more while we could give them more time, repeat directions, and not talk over/interrupt each other. I think after today we have a better division of labor and the experience from today will really help with this as well. It is great to get feedback from the students and to be able to discuss the day with each other!
I hope tomorrow goes just as well! :)
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