Blog #1

I definitely was a little surprised when I found out that we were only going to have two students in our 8th grade math class. I was even more surprised to find out that they were going to be the two quietest kids I've ever dealt with in one year of teaching. I'm laughing in my head just thinking about it. My initial goals for the lessons were basically to drill them with a variation of activities all pertaining to the first week's objectives. For instance, one of the first lessons was about adding and subtracting integers. I first gave them the basic notes over what an integer is and then we discussed them and made our own list of what we thought one was. I then would show a list of different positive and negative signs on the board and show them how they cancel each other out. We would then do a matching game with index cards, and then an activity where they were coming to the board and showing the rest of class how positives and negatives cancel each other out. Needless to say, I wanted to offer a variety of instruction that would cover everyone in the room.

I felt my learning goals were appropriate in terms of development, because in my one year of teaching I noticed that a lot of my students had only been exposed to one type of learning style. And since they didn’t pass the class, I’m going to take a guess and say that might be one reason why they did not master the 8th grade; maybe they just weren’t auditory learners. The learning goals I began with are very appropriate in terms of development, because a lot of them are foundational for excelling at the next grade. The majority of our lessons that we are going over include fractions, percents, decimals, integers. Since these are the building blocks for math, we have to make sure that we use all of the techniques available, so the student will for sure master the material.

And finally, the instructional decisions that we made were mostly geared towards having the student equipped enough where he/she could teach the objective to their peers. Because this was what we wanted, we definitely wanted to put into place a lot of procedures where the student has to figure some a concept out and present it to the class. I believe there is just something about orally presenting a concept that makes you remember it more. One particular inductive strategy that I used in my lesson plans was writing a list of numbers on the board and asking the student to group the numbers together however they wanted. They would, however, have to explain why they put the numbers in that particular order. This was extremely helpful just because it gave us a chance as teachers to see the student’s thought process. This definitely benefited our ability to now try and teach an objective to the student.