This week was a short week with the holiday. I have a really good grip on science and was able to get a lot of work done with planning. Tuesday starts my first day with a full take over. I am very excited about it. One of the things I was nervous about was planning for the entire take over. This week I was able to plan out next week fully by Thursday and was able to talk to my teacher for feedback and approval. I really liked having it all organized prior to the week beginning like the previous weeks have been. In planning I feel like I got that confidence I was looking for. I was able to see what areas I would need to really dive into and focus on. The challenge this week was VR googles. We had a lesson this week, were we able to use Virtual Reality googles. I would say this was a challenge to put together while leaning so heavily on technology for the success of a lesson. I was able to get it up and running, but after a 1/2 of setup and a lot of hiccups. My biggest takeaway with this is that I will insist on a trial run the day before to ensure I could figure it out.
In terms of new ideas I would say that I learned a new strategy for comparing and contrasting within this district. I know that the school limit the ability for the students to get involved in shared reading. However, I think a good idea would be that I team the students up to compare setting, characters, text features, problem/solution and instead of a turn and talk the students had a team time to come up with the answers they felt were important. This gets them more involved while still maintaining a modeling support for the students who require it.
Lastly I was working on getting a handle on science. I came up with stations for a leaf lesson. It worked really well for the students, and they LOVED it. It was fun for the students to complete the task quickly and have their full attention for each activity. In reflection, I would have had a small checklist or worksheet for the reading group, but they really enjoyed partner reading. I had paired up the strong readers with the students who needed more support. I hope to continue this success for next week and really be successful with taking on all the lessons for the week.
As one to teaches a lot of technology, I agree that you need to fully try things out before attempting to use them in your classes. So how did it go with the Google VR? I find that I get dizzy using most VR tools. How do the students handle it? Anyone throw up?
ReplyDeleteSo what did they do for the leaf lesson?