Solids, Quotations and the tastiest Jalapeno Bagels

Since I have officially gotten into full day teaching, the grading has become more intense. From now on, I will only be posting what happens in the classroom weekly rather than every day. I start writing just a few things and end up with a huge post each day. Anyways, this week was quite the interesting one. First off in math this week, the students learned all about the geometric solids (cone, cube, sphere, cylinder, rectangular prism, and pyramid). We had a really fun time trying to figure out what kinds of shadows each of the shapes would make depending on which side the light was shown on. The students also learned about measuring using metric units, mainly centimeters. The students were able to understand this concept easily as they already had practice using the inches side of the ruler to measuring lengths of different objects. The last thing they learned in math was how to find the perimeter of an object by measuring and adding up each of the sides. We did an interesting activity where the students had to find the perimeter of their desks, the room and other objects in the room.

For English this week, the students learned about quotation marks. On Tuesday, I showed the students comic strips with dialogue in them. We went over what it meant to have characters talking and what kinds of punctuation was used. Then the next day, the students created their own comic strips and added speech bubbles to create a story. Finally to tie it into writing, the students had to take what was said in their comic speech bubbles and turn it into a story using quotation marks. The students really, really loved this activity! They got so into it that we were almost late to lunch because of it. I was very impressed by how hard the students worked on their short stories with quotations and each of their comic strips was in chronological order as well as nice and neat.

In social studies, the students took a pre-assessment for my upcoming Capstone project unit on the pilgrims and the thirteen colonies. They seemed to know quite about about the Mayflower voyage, but not much about the colonies. That pre-assessment will help me generate the future lesson plans to go in this unit. I am really looking forward to teaching this unit as I created the entire thing from scratch!

As for the week in general, it was a wonderful time and the students were able to accomplish many assignments. We had almost no behavior problems and best of all, the students seemed to really enjoy the things they learned this week. I am still so excited to be here at Briggsdale for my student teaching. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

-Laura Hill