A Couple of Teaching Ideas

I had a couple teaching techniques that have worked that I wanted to write about. And also a couple things that I'm going to steal.

I had to teach verb tenses on Friday, June 10, so I wrote a story about going on a field trip with the class. For every verb, I gave them a choice of verbs in parentheses and they had to select the correct verb. I used my students as the characters, and they had to read the part of the story that had their name in it. They really seemed to like that, and it was a fun assessment of what they knew about verb tenses.

I also used inductive teaching during that lesson. I made a chart with different subjects (he, she, they, we, I) and then they told me what helping verb to use with each subject (such as am, is, are, was, were). They used the chart to create rules for helping verbs.

I got some good advice from a student today. He told me he had trouble with the assignments in the book because he usually didn't understand the directions. The book always gives an example of what the answer should look like but it doesn't describe how to reach the answer. The student told me that if we (the teachers) worked out the first two or three on the board, he would spend less time trying to figure out what to do and more time on the assignment. Rewording the directions isn't enough-- he wants us to clarify the thought process needed to answer questions in the book. I like that.

I'm doing my formal observation on Friday from 8:30 to 9:00. I wanted to go ahead and do it so that then I could observe some high school math classes. The only thing that's still hard for me is timing-- anything I think is going to take 5 minutes ends up taking 30. Hopefully I can cut down and really fit a lesson into that 20-30 minute period.