Day 5 - First lesson

On Friday, I taught my first lesson, to three classes. It was fun; the kids were great, and we all had a good time.

I like the school where I am apprentice teaching. The teachers are all nice, the kids are respectful and well-behaved, and still enjoy learning. This is a fun age, 10-12 year olds. They still like school, aren't quite blase yet - you don't have to work quite as hard to have fun with them!

The lesson was on the New England states. Because it was my first formal lesson my cooperating teacher (CT) picked out the lesson, and explained what she wanted me to do. Technically, I was only supposed to observe for the first week, so I am glad that I was given a chance to just jump right in, even though I was nervous a little.

Growing up in the northeast, learning to swim was always a challenge, because the warm water season is very short. I've never been one to slowly and torturously wade into cold water, I usually just take the plunge and get it all over with at once. It felt a little like that, just dove right into the class and got my first lesson over and done with. Now I can relax the tiniest bit and have more fun!

So I did a little intro discussion, to both draw out the students' prior knowledge and help me understand what they knew and didn't know. They'd already studied the colonies, so knew a lot about the states we would look at for the lesson, didn't know as much about the Revolutionary War period.

I found a fun state maze book, with really hard mazes! Pulled two out - Massachusetts, because they would get lots of info about Massachusetts in the video, and Maine, because the maze looked fun. They watched the video, we talked about some vocabulary, and then they worked on the maze while I walked around with the solution book, in case anyone thought they solved it. I think only about 3 or 4 students solved it during class, out of the almost 60 in all three classes, so I am truly a mean soul to give them such a difficult maze! They laughed a lot while calling me cruel and evil.
:-)

I'm glad to have the first one finished. I'm looking forward to the next two, because I am putting much more of myself and my own ideas into the next lessons. I'm pulling in my own experiences as a communication skills instructor, a DRE, a mom, and my ancient old theater background from high school and college and young adult years.

Practice is the best of all instructors.
~ Publilius Syrus