Week 4
This week was my fourth week student teaching at King Chavez. This week I had my first whole group lesson with the class. For this whole group lesson, I taught a lesson on probability. I got the lesson from my master teacher. It was a lesson my master teacher already had and she had used in the past with her classes. She said it went well with her last class so I decided to try it out. For this lesson, I showed a power point that reviewed the concept of tally charts, pictographs, bar graphs, and line plots. Then the students were given a hand full of M & M’s and then were asked to separate the M&Ms by color. Then they were required to keep track of each M&M color using a tally chart. Once they put their M&M data on the tally chart they were asked to graph this information into a pictograph, a bar graph, and a line plot. Outlines of each of these graphs were given to the student to help scaffold the graphing. The students had hard fill out the graphs based on their M&Ms and so I had to help many students create their graphs. At the end of the lesson, I realized I should have modeled how to complete the various graphs with a given amount of M&Ms. I think this would have helped the student better understand the directions and how to complete each graph. Overall, I think the student enjoyed the lesson especially since the lesson included something of student interest, M&Ms. By the end of the lesson, I think the students understood the concepts with my help. However, I don’t know if the students were ready for lesson that required them to use all three forms of graphing. I felt that they should have built a stronger foundation in each before having to do them all at once. I feel like this lesson would be more appropriate at the culmination of the unit on probability instead in the middle. After this lesson, my master teacher and I decided I would teach another whole group lesson the following week. Since my first whole group lesson was kind of a mess, I wanted to plan with her and get more direction to make sure the next one went better. However, my master teacher was not very receptive to this idea. She just told me to teach probability vocabulary and to do it any way I wanted. I was not ready to take that independence yet since I am still an amateur teacher and need support planning. This was the breaking point where I decided I was not getting the support I needed from this teacher and I needed more support from someone else. This decision was very difficult for me to reach but I knew it was best for me.