Here I sit on an airplane on my way home for the holidays and all I can do is reflect on my teaching. It’s the end of December the universal time for reflection. It’s hard not to end the year and prepare for the next and not reflect on life in general. My professional resolution this year is momentum. I want to continue the momentum from #wonderwake and all that I learned and challenged myself to begin. I’m ending 2016 with a blog post and I’ll begin 2017 with another.
This post was meant to be me reflecting on Standard 3 of the NC teacher evaluation standards. But, as I started to type it turned into my talking about a math lesson I taught in the hallway the last day before winter break and a track out. However I think this lesson I ramble about is a great example of how I meet this teaching standard.
I started out on my plan to dissect standards :
Standard 3 -Teachers know the content they teach – align to standard course of study, content appropriate to teaching specialty, recognize interconnectedness of content areas, make instruction relevant
My curriculum is based on the North Carolina Standard accursed of Study based on the Common Core State Standards. I am tasked with teaching 5 year olds to read and write, to understand how numbers work, basic science concepts (animals, weather, and properties), basic social studies concepts (citizenship, economics, cultural similarities and differences, and maps). I love that the standards I teach were written vertically. You can choose any strand and follow it all the way up through high school. I think this is so important for the students. It gives a purpose for every small piece I teach. Everything builds on the grades before and challenges students to learn more and think deeper.
Here’s what I’ve learned about my curriculum- basic is not basic at all! Teaching a child to read and write in 9 short months is nothing short of a miracle! There are times I’m not even sure how it happened! Students in kindergarten come in with the widest range of background knowledge than any other grade level! (Here’s where the ramble begins) For example- my current unit in math is geometry. Yes geometry in kindergarten! We learn 2 D shapes, 3D shapes, Positional words, comparing and building shapes. I have students who have not had any experience with any shapes and others who know basic shapes (circle, square, triangle…), and others who know it all already! Here are 2 of my students explaining. How they are exploring shapes. My friend in green took the lead. My friend in red is a little embarrassed to be on camera! 😄
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My job is to take what they know and teach them what they need to know. If they already know it I need to teach them a deeper understanding and how to use their knowledge to teach others. Tasking students with tutoring a peer who struggles is a great way to deepen their understanding. Teaching another student requires a child to think about it in a different way.
This lesson took place in the main hall at my school. We are a year round school and on our track out days I end up with out a physical classroom and need to be creative and flexible about where and how I teach. This was a shape hunting lesson- look for shapes in your world around you. How do they make up real things? (eh hem – engineering) pretty things? (errr – art) etc. My challenge is to not only have students who don’t know shapes to find and identify them but for students who do know shapes to describe, compare, and teach them.
In the video above Green was peer tutoring Red in shapes. He learned so much from her in 10 minutes that would have taken me at least 2 small group sessions to teach him. As they hunted for shapes they took videos using Chatter Pix Kids and SeeSaw (2 of my favorite apps to smash – if you don’t know them you need to explore!) Here’s Red’s post on SeeSaw after Green helped him hunt for shapes.
What do you think? Was my lesson here relevant? Connected? Appropriate? Aligned to standards?
#Innovate4Littles 