I'm Going To Teach A Lesson!

Hi everyone! For the class I'm taking on teaching math, I have to write and teach a lesson plan to the second grade class I observe in, towards the end of the semester. My professor will be there to watch and evaluate me. Frown! I thought, at least, I was safe for a few weeks, though... until when I got to Ash Elementary today, and my cooperating teacher, Mrs. Jones, told me she'd like me to try to teach a lesson next week! AUGH!
She gave me the teacher's edition of the math book and showed me the lesson I'll be in charge of, which is on estimating time. So its not like I'll have to write the lesson plan. I'll basically be following the guidelines in the book. On the other hand... this will only be my second time teaching a lesson! I think its a little odd that I've almost completed my entire teaching education and have only had one opportunity to actually teach a lesson to children. I've written plenty of lesson plans, and carried out a few in front of peers in my class, but only once in front of children! I'm a little anxious. Will I stutter and stammer and look like a fool? For my first lesson, I taught kindergarteners about magnets, and everything went wrong. This time, Mrs. Jones has suggested that I actually script out everything I am going to say and do. I'll probably post my "script" later on this week! Maybe someone can give me a few pointers!
I did work a little with a group of children today. I played Time Bingo with a group of kids who are having most difficulty learning to tell time. My group included Kristie, the little girl I mentioned in my last Ash Elementary post who has behavioral difficulties. She was being a wild woman today, but she actually did really well in my group. She seems like a lot of kids I've met in life... on one hand, she wants to please adults, earn praise, and make friends, but on the other hand she just can't stop bouncing around! The other kids were able to focus more easily, but they all had a terrible time with the clocks. They mixed up the hour hand and the minute hand, or they tried to count by fives to get the hour as well as the minute. For instance, if they saw a clock like this...

...some might say its is 2:50, and others might say its 50:10. Still others might call it 10:02, or 2:10. And a few tried to count by ten instead of fives, and would call this 10:20. With the first group, they had their Bingo cards turned to the analog side, and I would call out a time and have them look for that time on their cards. But it took them about a million years to look at each of the sixteen clocks on their cards, decide what time it was (usually incorrectly) and decide if any matched the time I had mentioned. So, for the second group, I had them turn their cards to the digital side. Then I'd show them a card with a clock on it, and we'd all figure out the time together, and then they'd check their cards. This was much easier for them, and I could keep track of who was actually getting the times right and who was having trouble. The problem was, the game was meant for a whole classroom, so there were about a million different calling cards, and almost none of the times I called out matched a time on any of the particular BINGO cards the kids in my group were using. It was a little discouraging for them to go through the long process of deciphering the time, and then not have it on their card ever! I think next week I will sort through the calling cards ahead of time, so that someone gets to mark their card for almost every clock we look at.
I was still observing when the teacher was working on what they call "Interventions," which is really just an extra reading class. Mrs. Jones was trying to teach them about the prefixes "un" and "dis." For part of it, she was showing them words with "dis," and the students would raise their hands and try to come up with an example of how the word is used. They were doing a good job with most of the words, until they came to the word "disorder." Some of their responses made me giggle!

Girl: "I disordered my mother."

Teacher: "How did you do that?"

Girl: "She told me to do something, so that was an order. I didn't listen to her, so I disordered her!"

Boy: "The people at the restaurant disordered us."

Teacher: "Can you explain more?"

Boy: "We gave them our order. They messed it up. It was a disorder."

LOL, right?
Well, wish me luck on my lesson next week!