Thursday, Day eighteen

Today was a big day. I had my first observation. Everything went very well despite how nervous I was. I had a really great lesson plan on paper. But when i got to teaching, I forgot a few things. One that I know I forgot was to make my lesson connection with real world events. We had a lesson on line graphs and I had intended to discuss line graphs that could be done to show some of our football players actions. I don't think I mentioned this at all. But nervousness will do that to you. My professor was a delight. I had never met her and she made every attempt to make me feel at ease. I can't believe I forgot that; I had went over it in my head so many times. But I'll get it next time. I am very happy with my review, I hope the others go this well.

The students were wonderful today. In our lesson they were assigned an online exercise. Many of them do not do much with email except read it. Today's lesson was a lot more than just reading and they did so well. I am very proud of them. We did our normal review of each graph and I feel they have really grasped this lesson. I hope to test them probably Monday. We did not have time for a proper review and I won't test them until I can do that. My ST is such a delight to be in the classroom with. He helps and encourages me all the way.

Normally at the 2pm class is when I can work with my little guy using the TOUCH math. Today he had some science work to catch up and we were to work after that. But he was very sick today and did not have the energy to hold his head up. We contacted the nurse and he went to see her. Just a couple of minutes after that my ST was called to the office. After a while he finally told us that he had fell off the slide at recess and just wasn't feeling well. He was complaining that it was hard to stand up or even hold his head up. They were trying to contact his parents to pick him up because we were all very concerned. The ST ending up taking him home. I hope they will take him to the hospital and have everything checked out. I am very worried about him. Even if everything checks out from the fall, I am sure he probably won't be there tomorrow. He was very sick. He is my buddy though, he likes to look at Cabela's magazines with me. He has big dreams and high hopes.

During third grade math the ST and I noticed something. These kids were confusing the operations of addition and subtraction. And they were not sure of what to do with the extra digit in a problem such as 73 + 65. Since there was only ones and tens, that's all they were writing down. So there answer would be 38 instead of 138. This is something we will be tackling tomorrow morning. A problem such as 75 - 63 was also answered as 38. We have our work cut out, but that is why we are here. I am loving this. There is a teachable moment everywhere you look.