Today was a pretty good day. It went by quickly, which is always nice. The best part of today was that math went really well! I tossed the Saxon Math lesson plan out the window and did my own thing (I'd already lesson planned for it, so I wasn't just pulling it out of thin air). I created a Smart Board page, made it all interactive, and did it with both classes today. Aryn complimented me and said she really liked the modifications that I had made! It was exciting, especially since math is my nightmare. (Have I mentioned that before?)
Today was also fun because I did my oceans pre-assessment. I had a blank map with five places marked (one on each ocean) and the names of the oceans cut out on different colored pieces of paper. I had the children go through them one at a time and put them where they thought they belonged. I emphasized that I didn't expect them to know all of the answers yet, since I haven't taught them anything about oceans! They really did try hard on the pre-assessment. Afterwards, I noticed that a whole lot of them put the Arctic Ocean down at the bottom, and I realized that they had just done a penguin unit before I got there, and so they connected "Arctic" with "Antarctica" and knew that penguins live at the South Pole...or Antarctica. It was pretty clever and showed good critical thinking skills...even though it was still wrong. I'll have to make sure to talk about the difference between the two places explicitly when I start my unit. In the end, most of them placed 0 correctly, a few placed 1, and one child placed 2 correctly. I'm pleased, because this leaves a lot of room for improvement! I think that once I teach them the song and we practice over and over, they will all show marked improvement by the end of the unit. I'm very excited to see how they grow over the next month.
I am aiming to finish most if not all of my lesson plans this week. I have 1/2 of next week's plans done, and I want to finish at least Opening, Journaling, Handwriting, Math, and Reading for the next 6 weeks. I'm saving planning Rotations because those depend on how the children are doing and what we need practice with, so it's best not to plan those well ahead of time. But the rest of them are pretty straightforward and I just need to put it all into writing! That is my project for the week. We'll see how my progress is coming when Friday rolls around.
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