November 8-12, 2010

This week was my first week of teaching my Mexico unit. I think that it has been going really well. The students are seeming to really enjoy it. My only issue is that I have so much I want to do with it, but have so little time to do it. I am allotted 30 minutes a day for my class and 30 minutes a day for Mrs. Tuck's class. By the time, the students get in and settled down, there is really only 20 minutes left of instructional time. I have had to modify my lessons to a great extent. This really upsets me because I feel like the students are missing out on so much information that they could really benefit from in the future. On the bright side, we have been having a lot of fun with the unit and the students are really retaining the information. Each day, I try to do a little review with them of everything that we have learned thus far and students have been remembering a lot more information than I ever imagined. I never imagined that students would remember that Mexico's full name is the United Mexican States and that it has 31 states. This unit has also caught the attention of one of my ESL students. I have noticed that it is very hard to keep him engaged, but this unit has changed that. He is now participating and very interested in what is going on.



Week 4 Action Research
This week, students took their Unit 3 posttest. I looked at all of the exit slips and compared them to the post test. I have noticed that many of the students who have been performing poorly on the exit slips did very well on the posttest. I am wondering if this is because they studied or if that they just needed more practice. The way that Everyday Math is set up is so that once a topic is introduced, students continue to review it in their Math Boxes. At the end of each unit, students are only expected to know concepts that are continuously reviewed, rather than concepts that are introduced within the unit.