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.