There's an old saying that goes, "Man makes plans and God laughs." Well I can definitely relate to that adage this week. Looking back at my carefully constructed lesson plans, I wonder how I ever thought it would all work out.
This is my first week to meet with my students as a group. On Monday, I thought I would spend a few minutes allowing students to explore the room and then play a name game with them. The first activity was to have students put the letters of their first name in order using letter tiles, then glue them onto a folder. I thought to myself, "they're second graders, how hard could it be." Then I remembered why they come to me. Okay - let's start at putting letters in order from left to right...As you might have figured out, we never even got to the game.
I also have some unexpected behaviors in my class this year. Since I had a good knowledge base of five out of six students from last year, I thought behavior issues would be minimal, but apparently, they learned some new ones over the summer. Because of this, I had to create a behavior chart for the first time. Of course, since this was something new, the interest was more tuned in to who was getting on yellow than what was going on in the lesson.
The good news is, putting on music seems to be having the desired calming effect. On Monday, when one particular student was very "energetic," I put on some classical music and he seemed to relax pretty quickly - even though it was only for about five minutes. The other students also calmed down and became more earnest about working. We were able to complete the letter tile activity without any further major interruptions.
On Tuesday, I pretty much tossed my plans aside and went on instinct. Since I knew the calm music had a desired effect, I tried it again - this time with the music to our first book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? by Bill Martin, Jr. I put the song on as soon as the students entered the room and asked them to listen to see if they recognized the song. All of the students began to listen intently and I saw some smiles of recognition appear on their faces.Although my little energetic friend chose to segregate himself at a work table away from the group, I noticed him singing away as he busied himself with some letter sound manipulatives. The rest of the lesson went pretty well until I tried to administer the initial assessment. I asked the students to spread out around the room and gave clipboards to a couple of students who were not at a table. Bad idea! This was definitely too much freedom and resulted in way too much off task behavior ("How come she has a clipboard?", "I want to sit over there." "I'm moving!") to the point that I had to abandon the assessment and have another chat about behavior expectations.
I have decided that I will try to assess students two at a time instead of all six at once. Although this will put me a little behind on my timeline, I think it will provide me with more accurate data. I'll keep you posted and let you know how it goes!
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