As expected with any placement, the takeover process is gradual and very manageable. When it comes to my semester, I have been thrown in early with teaching. Now when I say teaching, I mean standing in front of the students and talking. I am not planning a schedule. I am not developing lesson plans. I am merely delivering a lesson.
Now, I do not want that to sound like a negative thing because I am so grateful to just be given this opportunity and to be in front of the students. I am not at the planning point in my semester other than a couple lessons here and there for my observations so I am right on track. That being said, I like going above and beyond every once in a while so when I saw the opportunity to plan a fun activity for my students, I ran with it.
As I mentioned before, I am one of those people who pins a million different lesson plan ideas and bulletin boards on Pinterest that I hope one day I will get to. That day finally came, at least for one of the lessons. Skimming through my Pinterest board, I found the perfect lesson to implement into the current curriculum.
My students were being introduced to slope and starting to take a closer look into how to find slope between two points and how to use a coordinate plane to their benefit when finding slope. With slope being such a visual concept, I didn’t think it made much sense for my students to continue practicing using worksheets when I could develop something much more head on. I am fortunate enough to have a cooperating teacher who is very supportive of my random ideas (a.k.a Pinterest ideas) that I want to try. I developed a rough draft of the plan to show him during our supervised study period to get the go ahead before tackling the project tonight for the next day’s class.
The students were going to have a Battleship tournament. That night after getting my go-ahead, I sat down with my mom (also in the education world) and forced her to play approximately 30 games of Battleship with me until I perfected the rules I wanted my students to follow. Once the rules were narrowed down for all levels of students, I had to develop a game board. Knowing that I am just beginning my journey as I teacher, I figured that a reusable board was the best course of action so that if I wanted to play this later on in my career or even later on in the week, I did not have to waste 20 more trees just so my students could play a couple games. The game board was simple, a coordinate plane, images of the “ships” they were to place on the coordinate plane, and printed rules to look back to for reference points. All of these were printed out, laminated, and taped to a manilla folder – thus my final product of reusable game boards. Each folder had two games on it, with two different sets of rules, to fit the levels of my students (see picture).
The rules were pretty simple. For the general education students, they were to place their ships on the coordinate plane at some angle, find the slope of their ship, and begin guessing coordinate points of their opponents ships. Once they hit an entire ship, they had to find the slope of the ship in order to sink it. For the honors students, they were to place their ships on the coordinate plane horizontally or vertically. In order to hit their opponent’s ships, they had to guess equations of line. The partner graphed that line to see if a ship was hit. This continued until all of their ships had been sunk. With the boards made, and the rules set, I was excited to see if my idea would be successful.
The next day I was pumped to show my cooperating teacher the work I had put in and see the game in action. The students were beyond excited to have a change of pace and no longer sit through a lecture and a worksheet. I, of course, adjusted the game as we went along through the periods as I saw more students playing and more ideas began flowing. By the end of the day, the students were mastering the idea of slope using the game boards. I think I was more excited than the students though. I was given the opportunity to see my hard work come to life and see students excited to use it.
With one successful lesson under my belt, I am excited to push myself and try many more!
xoxo,
Miss C