It is the last week of field experience and I cannot believe how fast this went by. As I have started to connect with the students and my cooperating teacher it will be hard to say goodbye on Friday! One new thing I learned this week was how hard it can be to teach a math lesson with different learning levels. Our class is pretty divided with catching onto the material and when we learned about fact families the division in the classroom was apparent. I discussed with my cooperating teacher how long she normally spends on hard lessons and she explained how she had to cut the lesson short because we are behind. She mentioned how she wrote notes to parents on their homework to have them go over the material more at home, but there is not many ways to tell that this is actually being done at home.
I am just curious to hear how other cooperating teachers deal with being 'behind' with their lessons? No right or wrong answer! Are they cutting out material or are they eliminating other elements in the classroom in order to catch up? Just a few things I am thinking about for future reference on how I want to run my classroom. Hope everyone enjoys their last days in the classroom!!
My cooperating teacher has free time where the kids get to pick toys and games to play with for about 20 minutes. If they don't get there "seat work" done they can lose free time.
ReplyDeleteI have also noticed that the kids go to recess late some days because lessons are taking longer. This is usually due to the kids not listening or using their worktime wisely.