Interaction

One of the biggest struggles I've had lately in terms of classroom management is how to keep students engaged.  There always seems to be five or six kids that always raise their hand and always answer the questions that I pose.  There are also four or five kids that sit on the fringes of class discussions and only participate when called upon.  In the past, I've successfully used "pick sticks" that are drawn at random.  With this class, though, we have a couple of kids that freeze up entirely when they are called upon to answer something without warning.  In order to keep the kids that are anxious at ease, we haven't used the pick sticks very much.

In the past two observations with my supervisor, she's noticed that I spend a lot of time reinforcing how my students should sit in a circle.  This sounds silly, but I really have had to tell them to make room for everyone, sit up, and only have one voice talking at a time almost every time we sit down in a circle.  It's exhausting!  My supervisor's point is that it really isn't THAT important that they sit in a circle.  She charted my student's movements during two points of my last lesson, one point where they were sitting in a circle, and another when they were just gathered in a group by the board.  It was really interesting to me that while the kids on the fringe mostly stayed there, all of the students moved closer to me while they were in the group and not in the circle.  It seemed, at the time, to make more sense to sit in a circle so that everyone could see the demonstration, but if I'm spending half of the lesson micromanaging the way that kids are sitting, is it worth it?

Along those same lines, the kids have been really, really "squirrely" lately.  I don't know if it's the time of the year or the colder weather, but my goodness!  They don't sit still.  They whine about sitting on the floor or flop their bodies around during instruction.  I do a lot of group thinking and brainstorming in my teaching, and it just so happened, that today during my second lead day, we did this twice.  My plan coming into it was to have kids brainstorm aloud with me calling on volunteers to share responses.  However, the kids had a really chatty morning and were unusually excited about life.  I loved that they were happy, but it was hard to get through the things we needed to get through!  In writing, we are having the kids do a self-evaluation that we can share for conferences on Thursday.  I wanted them to come up with a list of things that we've done in a number of subjects so that they'd have something to draw from and some concrete examples to use on their evals.  Because they really couldn't sit still, I had kids name things that we'd done in each subject and had them come write it up on the board.  I knew that the spelling would be off on some things, but spelling wasn't the goal here.  They came up with an impressive list!

In science, we did an awesome activity where the kids got to act like water molecules moving around to all of the places on earth that have water.  We brainstormed a list of places on earth that contained water at the start of the lesson.  Because things had gone so well this morning, I decided to let them write on the board again.  I was happily surprised at how many kids raised their hands to particpate.  Instead of the same five kids sharing all the answers, a couple of the kids that are ordinarily on the fringe volunteered their ideas!  It was awesome.  In the activity, they rolled a dice and moved from station to station, recording which steps they took.  So from the ocean, there only options were to stay in the ocean or get evaporated into the clouds.  By using customized dice at each station, it revealed the length of time that molecules really stay at each place on our planet.  They LOVED it!  In the end, we created the web below, which revealed that the water cycle isn't nearly as simple as we make it out to be. 

Overall, it was a good day.  There were shenanigans and a few times where I just had to laugh, shake my head, and move on, but that's teaching for you!

Much love,
BJT