Week Six: Final Tech Club

This week's tech club was a little different because there were 5 of us there instead of just Kiona and me.  The kids were in trouble and lost their recess privileges and we only ended up having 6 kindergarten girls and about 4 fourth-grade girls so we were over staffed on our end and the fourth-grade girls were helping the kindergartners figure things out so we really didn't have to do much instructionally.  We also had less time because of the recess debacle so we had the kids talk about rhyming briefly, play games on "Suessville" and then we played some drawing and rhyming games.  I think it was cool opportunity to see the kids helping one another this time, developing their own teaching skills.

Overall, it was a good experience for me to work with this age group of kids, I have heightened respect for elementary teachers and I'm certain I want to teach secondary.  It was really challenging for me to have a conception of what the really young kids were capable of doing on computers and made making educational lesson plans even more challenging.

Week 5: PBS Kids

So after last week's switch to games, I decided to peruse the PBS kids website games and found several that provided a lot of cool interactive opportunities for students.  One included using the web cam to bat the wings of a bat using your own arms and using your head to direct the animal on the game.  Pretty hilarious to watch them do.  As well as spelling games and games about animals.  The kids had a lot of fun and classroom management was quite a bit easier because they were so into the games.  When they were all lined up they shared what game they played and something they learned.  A good way to sum things up I think!

Week 4:

This week we wrote a lesson plan to have kids use google earth and find things like The Great Wall of China and the Eiffel Tower.  We couldn't download google earth to the computers though so we basically scrapped the lesson plans and used school approved educational games for an hour.  The kids loved it! I felt like a cop-out kind of but the Principle asked us to do games because the kids were burnt out from school so I guess it is ok.  I'm definitely learning to be very flexible with lesson plans for these kids, and I want the priority to be them enjoying their time with us and hopefully learning something.

Bonus!

Two kids had to be dismissed from our lesson for bad behavior and had to write Kiona and I apology letters.  Pretty awesome.

And here is the Oh Noah! Site we used:

Week 3: Oh Noah! Lesson

Today was seemingly much more successful than last week.  I felt like the students were pretty engaged and enjoying the lesson.  The lesson plan was to talk about languages they had heard of, then play games to learn a few spanish words from the PBS Kids website "Oh Noah!" and then share a few words they learned in spanish.  I had hoped we could spend some time with power point and make a poster on a slide, but we ended up having K-3rd graders (24 kids) and it was just too broad and would have taken a lot of instructional time.  Our classroom management was definitely improved from last week, I felt like I was helping kids and not overwhelmed with questions.  We did pre-load the pages this time which made a huge difference.  Something that did help this week was one of the student teachers came and helped facilitate the lesson.

I think the age range has really provided the biggest challenge for us.  It has just been difficult to plan lessons when the knowledge and basic computer skills are on such a broad spectrum with the students.

Overall, a really good day and I was able to take away some more goals on classroom management and keeping the kids engaged with age appropriate activities.

Week 2: Our First Lesson Plan

This week we did our first lesson with first and second graders.  It was certainly a learning experience.  The lesson required too much focus and sitting time from the kids who had already been in class all day.  It also took a lot of classroom management skills because we had some "trouble-maker" kids who kept it pretty interesting.  For next week I am planning on keeping it much more interactive with games and highly engaging activities so hopefully that will keep the students more interested in the activity.

Week 1: Meeting with the principle

Meeting with the principle was enlightening in the idea that the information he gave us completely shifted my mind set of how things were going to go during my lessons.  Our students are primarily 2nd and 3rd grade (completely out of my comfort zone), they have been sitting in classrooms all day, they don't want a lesson they want to move, do something interactive and have fun.  I'm not really sure the information given to us in the Edu class was really reflective of the scenario we were presented with in Tech Ed Club.  The lesson plans we had to create in class were not necessarily applicable once I found out what was really desired from the Principle.