Here I Go Again on My Own

For the past two days, my mentor teacher has not been at school. So, it’s been completely up to me to make sure things are running smoothly and productively. The day flies by so much quicker when you are completely in charge of everything. I used to just kind of sit back or interact with students when we were transitioning in the morning, and people are leaving the room and people from other classes are coming in to our room. However, I’ve found that when in charge of everything going on, there are a thousand things running through your mind, and those transitions feel like you only have five seconds to have everyone where they need to be, and everything set up for the next lesson. Luckily, the students in my class are responding well to me being THE one in charge on these days. I feel like we have established a pretty good mutual respect for each that makes this possible. Really the only snag we hit was during ELT on Wednesday when students from the other home room were mixed in with us. They had a little bit of the “sub mentality.” However, I believe we got things smoothed out because ELT ran smoothly today and was quite productive.

Speaking of ELT, it has been a wonderful learning experience over these past two days. This week is the first time meeting with this specific group since we do flexible groups based on pre and post tests. So, I did not know a lot about these kids, other than the fact that they scored in the range that placed them in our ELT class. Well, come to find out on Wednesday, half of them did not know how to find the GCF of two numbers, and many of those didn’t know what a GCF is. So, after noting who all needed remediation/re-teaching, I allowed the other half of the class to move along with the activity while I gave a mini-lesson on GCF.  I then made modifications last night to today’s lesson and worked out a way to get the class on the same page by the end of the lesson.  I gave another quick mini-lesson on GCF as an activation, and then allowed the kids who did not need remediation to explore some tougher scenarios and word problems with finding the GCF, while I got the others started on finding GCF by themselves, and showed them alternative methods to finding the GCF.  Eventually, I allowed the kids not needing remediation to begin working on what was originally planned for today by themselves to see if they could figure out the connection between finding the GCF and putting fractions in their simplest form, while I reviewed the problems the others were practicing with them. By the end of the lesson, I was able to give them a lead into tomorrow’s lesson that everyone could now begin to understand.