November 29-December 3, 2010

This week was my last week of full time teaching. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I have been having problems with behavior. I decided to start a competition between groups. I wrote Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3 on the board. When all members in the group are sitting quietly and ready to listen, the group gets a smiley face. The group with the most smiley faces at the end of the day is the group that gets to line up first and pack up first the following day. Smiley faces can also be taken away. This has proved to be a pretty effective method. Students hate to see their smiley faces erased.
This week, I had a few teachable moments. On one of our worksheets, students were asked to fill in the beginning consonant blends. The one made the word dragon. There was a big debate about whether or not dragons were real. I asked the class if they have ever heard of an animal that has the word dragon in its name. Students immediately said komodo dragon. We then used the smart board to look up komodo dragons and learn a little bit about them by looking at pictures and watching videos. The students loved this! While the komodo dragon is a lizard, it looks like a small dragon.

Action Research Week 7
This was my last week of Action Research. It is very difficult for me to tell whether or not my action research was successful or not because of the way that the Everyday Mathematics series is set up. It is not just one or two concepts being covered; it is a multitude of concepts. From this research, my mentor teacher and I were able to create a smaller group of students who we found to be having a difficult time with the concepts. This allowed us to spend more individual time with these students and work on the skills that they were really struggling with.