Monday 9/21 and Tuesday 9/22

Monday, Monday, Monday! Aw, I was finally feeling much, much better yesterday and could actually perform at my full potential for the first time in nearly a week. Mondays are still a super shocker for me. Not seeing my kids for 3 days seems like an eternity when I'm trying to learn everything about everyone of them. It's not like I am 4 month into a job and cherish the time off yet, I'm still scrambling to learn the ropes.

Tuesday, however, was rad! Like super-duper rad awesomeness. I showed up at 8:45 to discover that our math teacher was not going to be able to teach the first period math group... our second graders. Elaine jumped at the opportunity and volunteered us to take up the loose ends. Luckily I had gone over the lesson the night before (completely by chance, I usually am not that prepared). Elaine and I kind of took rounds, teaching the lesson one section at a time. It was rocky at first, mostly becuase we didn't know their routine and we didn't know all the students (each of us knew 1/3 of the kids).

But once we got into the new material, it was really a lot of fun! The math cirriculum is pretty scripted, so it's not like we had to think outside the box much (or really make any creative decisions at all). But, it was still awesome to feel in control of the material and run a lesson with fairly decent success considering we were thrown into it less than 30 minutes before.

We did some of the mental math practice as warm-up, then reviewed how to tell time of the clocks (this was the rocky part). Then we had them sit in the seats, which really helped the social control of the classroom. Elaine taught a song that would help us count by 2's and then by 3's. Then I handed out a number grid and we colored in the patterns of 2's and 3's. It was interesting to see how quickly some kids picked up the patterns, and how completely abstract the patterns were to other students. Once everyone finished their patterns, we filled in our own number grids from different starting points (1, 101, 201, etc) so that as a class we would count to 1,000. It was pretty successful and I feel like all but 2 kids walked out of our classroom with a much better understanding of number grids, with nearly half mastering the skills covered today.

Aw, now I am just itching to do more!