Teaching Full Classes

This week I had my first day teaching an entire class from start to finish, transitions, and all. It was great, I enjoyed it a lot and thought it went very well. Knowing there is always room for improvements and tweaks within presenting a lesson to students, nothing went terribly wrong.

I am focusing on first and second grade this week, which have shown to be the most difficult for me because of the lack in ability to fully communicate with them. Using terms that they are used to like: "good morning" "pick up your pencil" "open your book to page ___" "close your book" "raise your hand" "lets play a game" put away your pencil" "repeat after me" "stand up" and "sit down" is extremely important. Weather or not they can understand much beyond that depends on the class and the grade level. I can use a high amount of modeling and examples in order to help them understand new phrases and instructions, but it is rare that explaining a whole new activity or game that they have never before been exposed to will work out.

One thing that is fairly difficult with having a certain amount of content that needs to be completed during the class period is managing the amount of time you will spend on each activity. Even when I was only teaching for 10 or 20 minutes in each class period, it was hard to know how much time each activity would take classes; I was able to get a better idea of this as the week went on. Today, when I taught the whole period, it was significantly easier to manage my time when I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish and how much time was remaining, and even how much time had already passed.

I feel as if the students are getting more and more used to me guiding their instruction, which is awesome; because in turn, I then feel more comfortable standing in front of them. They were a little surprised today when I started the lesson rather then Teacher Sunny, which was an expected reaction from them. In turn with that, they inevitably become harder to manage; this applies mostly to the sixth graders, not as much with the first and second graders, but it still does to some extent. I also feel more confident when it comes to managing the classroom and the students' participation. I have found little subtle cues that work in settling down students or getting specific student to participate.

Hopefully the rest of the week continues with these results, and maybe I even find myself making improvements to my lessons that I didn't even know could be made. I am sorry for the picture-less post, but I figured since I am actually here to teach, I should update you on how it is going! haha