Monday & Tuesday: Math & Abbreviations

It is amazing how time seems to fly by when I start working. When I started working my little clock in the corner of my computer screen said 9:00, now it's 10:25. Sometimes I'm convinced that I'm not actually lesson planning. I think I am actually being hypnotized into some kind of a trance that lasts hours at a time and when I wake up my cat Pumpkin has mysteriously materialized in my lap and my lesson plan for the next week has been hacked up and revised. As a new teacher I find that is something I do a lot: create a week's worth of lesson plans that seemed perfect at first, and then end up revising it again.

That's enough about lesson planning though...

Monday

Monday was a big day for math. A few trainee in the class have hit a wall which is requiring a considerable amount of patience to overcome on their part. I am very proud of the fact that one trainee in the class started out memorizing the multiplication table and is now onto long division. This one trainee has been stuck on dividing 5/6 digit numbers by 2 digit numbers for a few weeks now but he has yet to say, "I quit, I want to go back tot he stuff I already know how to do, and I don't want to learn anything else new." Other trainees have gotten even farther including one student who started in multiplication, mastered multiplication, went into division, mastered division, and is not into fractions.

As well as improving each trainees' math computation skills we also spent a large portion of Monday choosing and practicing spelling words. I continue to allow the trainees to choose their own spelling words, but I spend more individualized time helping each one pick out their words. What I have found in the past is that trainees sometimes pick words they already know, which doesn't help them to expand their abilities. The trainees are expected not only to select challenging spelling words, but to define the words they choose as well. The vocabulary portion of our spelling practices has led to some interesting learning opportunities before. One example I can think of when spelling and vocabulary fostered a new learning opportunity was when student had chosen "chloroplast" as a spelling words. As the trainee and I began breaking down the meaning of the word "chloroplast" our conversation turned towards how plants get food vs. how animals get food, what Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide are, and what is the process called photosynthesis.

Tuesday

Today's favorite lesson among the students was abbreviations and how to write with them.

I have been focusing on punctuation for the last few weeks in this class by identifying types of sentences, which punctuation goes with each type of sentence, and writing their own sentences with the correct punctuation. At least half of the class can identify a given sentence's type as well as how to punctuate, however most of the class still requires reminders to use punctuation in their own writing. I will need to continue to give the class opportunities to write so that they can continue to practice with punctuation.

To add on to writing I added using abbreviations in writing today. I focused on four common abbreviation types: days of the week, months of the year, people's titles, and addresses. To teach this lesson I started out by passing out blanks with the abbreviation next to a blank, the students were asked to write the full word next to any abbreviation they thought they knew. I was very impressed by how the students naturally reached out to each other for help and offered aid when they saw a need.

After going over the common abbreviations I played a memory game using Bingo cards. The rules of this particular Bingo game were that I would say the full word out loud and the students had to find its abbreviated version on the card. The class really enjoyed the game, I played until everyone got the chance to win at least once. One poor person in the class had a "cursed" Bingo card and at least three other trainees in the class had earned a Bingo over 3 times before she even got a Bingo once!

Lastly, after ensuring everyone had practiced their abbreviations I finished the lesson with a few pages which required matching, editing, and writing abbreviations.