Taylor Nesmith

Week 3 Reflection

Week 3 for student teaching was a pretty good week. I taught the 2 highest ability classes most
of the week. On Friday the class did some activities for the 1000 th day of school (100th, but if you do the
math it is 1000 for 5th graders). Mrs. Petre ran that activity for all the classes, except for 6 th period which
I ran. The rest of the week I did both classes.

On Monday I created a Kahoot that I did with 4 of the 5 classes. It was a review of decimal
division. I was a little bit concerned with period 3 and 4 because they didn’t seem to remember a lot of
the content that they should have known. I made sure to review all the questions that a good bit of
students got wrong. I think that after reviewing how to get the correct answers they understood better.
Some kids didn’t listen well when I was trying to explain but I would bring them back in by simply saying
“is everyone listening” and they would get quiet again. Periods 5 and 6 had no problem and they were
more worried about who could answer the quickest to get the most points. It was a fun activity for them
but still had an educational purpose and review to it. It was also a great way to see which students were
really understanding the content and which weren’t.

Period 6 finished their last section of chapter 5 and then it was just review the rest of the week. I
did a homework review up in front of the whole class and I’m still trying to figure out what I think the
best way to go over homework is. I don’t want to waste a lot of class time going over everything so I
have just been spot checking and reviewing the questions that seemed the most difficult. They also
started the review for the test on Wednesday and Thursday and I decided to go over the tough
questions in the lesson group so that they could get some help with the challenging parts.

Period 5 was the class I just began teaching. I only taught them 2 actual lessons because they
had their mid-chapter check one day which is a check for understanding half way through the chapter
and it is graded. I gave them a few hints and reminders before starting which I believe helped them to
succeed better. I started grading them and most looked pretty good. I taught them to use compatible
numbers when estimating on Tuesday, and that was sort of difficult for me because compatible numbers
are part of the “new math” so I never learned that until right before I taught it. I had to review a couple
of the homework problems with them but they mostly seemed to understand it.

Next week I also take over the period 4 class, which tends to have the most behavior issues. I
haven’t had to deal much with behavior issues yet so it will be interesting to see how that goes with me
teaching them instead of Mrs. Petre, and how they handle that.