Reflection of Tenths and hundredths lesson

The third grade students only had one lesson about decimals
prior to this one I taught. My MT taught the introductory lesson about
decimals the day before so this was still a new concept for the
students. This posed a challenge for me in the sense that my lesson
was more practice and reinforcement than teaching new material.
Previously, all my math lessons were about teaching new concepts so
this was the first time I wasnt teaching anything concretely new in my
lesson. Because of that, a lot of my lesson was based on where the
students were the day before. This made it harder for me to create a
lesson plan since I didnt know how much students were going to know
before I started this lesson.
After watching Mr. H teach the first lesson about decimals, I went
back and did a little bit of revision to my lesson plan. Mostly I just
changed the warm-up activity to reflect what the students ended on.
Since we worked with base-10 blocks, students were able to learn
about tenths and hundredths in a different way. This was beneficial for
some students but not so much for others. I noticed that some
students felt that the lesson was going to slowly. The students who
really understood the concept finish quickly so they had to wait for
their classmates to finish. Because of that, they started to lose interest
in the lesson. This was also an interesting struggle because all the
students finished creating their decimals on the grid at different times
so I had difficulties on pacing. I would say that students were generally
eager to use the base-10 blocks, which perked their interest in the
lesson.
After reviewing the assessment task, I was relieved. I didnt feel
like the lesson went that well, mostly due to logistical issues. However,
students did well on the assessment. There were a handful of students
who had simple errors that I knew they would be able to fix if I gave it
back to them. Most students got number 2 wrong (one and eight
tenths). I wasnt surprised because we hadnt gone over numbers such
as that. I only put it on the assessment because I was curious about
how students would respond.
After this lesson, I have learned many logistical things about
teaching lessons. I learned that wait time is more necessary than
meets the eye. Things like asking the question before picking out the
name stick is a good way to give students that little time to think about
the answer. Also when using the projector, it is important to speak
louder or use the microphone because it is loud. I noticed several
students who were impatient and fooled around with the base-10
blocks. This reminded me to pay more attention to particular students
in the future and be sure that ground rules are laid. Although I didnt
feel great about this lesson, I still think many things went well and

learned a lot from the things that didnt go as smoothly as I would have
liked.