Journal One from Field Experience:

What did you observe, how did you feel, what was the classroom like and kids....anything you
want to share.

I joined Timothy Blanusa’s zoom on Thursday April 8th, 2021 at 1:30pm. I observed Mr. Blanusa
doing a quick sound check with his students, on zoom, to make sure he could hear them. I
thought this was a very good idea, because if he realized later, in the lesson, that he could not
hear his students that would be a problem. It was good to figure this out right at the beginning.
Then, he told his students that he wanted them to pull up their exit ticket and that he was going to
share his screen with them. He told them that they were going to flip between the exit ticket and
the paper they were going to be working with for the day. He did a great job of communicating
with his students and made sure they understood what he was asking them to do which I thought
was great. He pulled up a math worksheet and asked one of his students one of the questions on
the math sheet. He asked how you would write 100 to the power of 10. He reminded his students,
for this problem, you can count how many zeros there are in 100 and so it would be 10 to the
power of two. Mr. Blanusa also mentioned that the power is the exponent. The students were all
on zoom, and so Mr. Blanusa was able to share his screen to work with the students on math. He
also let one of his students have his camera off so that he could hear better. Mr. Blanusa made a
deal with this student and made sure that he kept reiterating the deal, so the student understood.
He was doing a great job of making his students all feel very comfortable which is so important.
The teacher worked a lot on counting numbers and digits and worked a lot on powers and
exponents. He also worked on hundredths, tenths, tens, etc. with the students to help them name
numbers. Most of the lesson was about a number to the power and how to write the number. Mr.
Blanusa made sure to let the students know that whatever the exponent is is the number of zeros
there would be in the number, so for example if it was 10 to the power of 8 there would then be 8
zeros in the number. One of the students spoke out when it was not her turn and the teacher let
her know that he just wanted her to give a thumbs up. One of the other students was having a
tough time with the math and Mr. Blanusa really had to help him and give him plenty of time to
think. He did a great job of trying to balance working with two different kinds of students.