Learning to laugh at myself...

Today I taught 2 full blown lessons. I began with language arts. I taught the lesson I was supposed to teach yesterday. We read a narrative poem called "I Have Heard of a Land." It uses a lot of really creative imagery to paint mental pictures. I decided to focus in on the writer's craft. After introducing the vocabulary, I went through and asked them how the author used creative words to create mental pictures in their minds. For example, the author talked about "The earth is red with promises" and how she could have also just said "The soil was fertile." I wanted them to go through the poem on their own and pick out sentences and describe the mental picture the author was trying to create. I quickly found out that the majority of them weren't at that level. I had to meticulously go through the poem and work with the kids to get them to understand what the pictures were and how the author was creating visual images for them. It took much longer than expected. After that, I had them write their own poems (in some cases they turned into paragraphs) and I had to walk around and offer a lot of help and suggestions to get them started. In the end, we had quite a few successful stories as they slowly began to grasp how to use imagery. One of the boys talked about the violence and fights he sees every day on his street. (The prompt was to write about a place they had never been but dreamed of going to, or describe where they live now.) I thought that a near two-hour lesson would be impossible, but I have learned these kids need a lot more time than I expect when I initially write the lesson plan!

After lunch I taught a math lesson on rates. That one actually seemed to go fairly well. They were able to solve the problems and create their own. Some of them are clearly a lot farther behind which meant that when we went over them as a class, they just copied the answer. This is when my epic fail came about. I have a boy from the DR, Oscar, who likes to pretend he doesn't understand any English at all. I know he understands a lot more than he lets on. I also know he can do math. However, he was having a hard time understanding the word problems about rates because of the English. I tried my hand at some brilliant Spanglish. I decided to say "En un dia, tu comes tres mansanas. En tres dias, cuando mucho mansanas tu comes?" That was a horrible sentence, besides the fact that I said cuando instead of cuanto. When much apples you eat? Hahahaha! I made little errors throughout the day which my students happily pointed out, but it was ok. I learned to laugh at myself.

My co-op had another meeting today so the kids were outside playing for the last hour of school. I got bored, so I joined the four square game. "You playin', Miss Becky?" Shouts rang out and fourth graders from all over the schoolyard came running to watch "Miss Becky play!" Naturally I was pretty bad at it, but once I got into it, I started getting kids out. Hahaha. It was a lot of fun. They're all pretty cute, except a couple of them treat me more like a peer than a teacher. Jaime calls me "Nasty teacher" with a huge grin on his face. He's lazy and doesn't like being pushed to do his work. Kaseem just has an attitude. He's going to be an interesting teenager. Jalissa is a bit of a teacher's pet and Tymir likes to point that out to me. They're all so funny and they're still such kids. Go two grades up and it all changes.

One of the things that I'm learning is that it's so nice to have a class to gear lesson plans to. I know certain things that WILL NOT work if I directly followed the curriculum. Knowing my class, knowing the needs of my class, help me learn so much more about lesson planning than I'd ever learn in a methods class.