1st lesson

March 16- Today's lesson was the first of five lessons for our unit on Kingergarten Economics. We began with an interactive read aloud and my partner K led this first half of our lesson. She read a story called "Caps for Sale," a perfect story to fit with our follow-up activity on coins. She did a great job reading the story, engaging the students and really helping them understand the meaning of the story. I was very pleased and proud of my partner. Following the interactive read-aloud we went into instruction time. We discussed coins, particularly we covered penny, nickel, dime and quarter. I was very happy to see that most of the students had covered this in their classroom prior to this lesson. Well they had focused on one at least, the nickel. I originally planned to simply discuss these coins by showing them a picture and having one of the kids come up and paste the corresponding name and its value next to it using the easel board. However I realized that with this particular group you really have to be very careful with how you plan instruction time. Instruction for these kids is often a frustrating experience. My classroom has several, I would imagine actually the majority of the classroom has kids with behavioral problems, some with severe and pronounced ones. So when it comes to teaching a lesson it's often a bit stressful on both ends. So I knew that I really had to push this lesson, really help them see beyond. so i changed my lesson a bit. for the discussion in order to help them remember the value of the penny, i used my fingers and hands to show them. For the penny i said, "boys and girls, how much is a penny worth?" and some knew it was one cent while others shouted 10 cents, so i told them, "everyone lets raise one finger and wiggle it around, one penny is one finger, keep that in your head." then i moved on to a nickel and again i used my fingers, I said, "A nickel is 5 cents so thats one hand or how many fingers in one hand boys and girls?" and they shouted "fingers," and so forth. i could really see from their expressions that this helped them actually understand how much these coins were worth, or at least i saw this for the time being. so after working with coins and their values i demonstrated what they were to do at their tables. for this activity, the kids would play the role of buyer. each child had 4 coin picture cards (picture cards of a penny, nickel, dime and quarter with the corresponding value next to it to help them remember) then in the middle of the table they had 10 pictures (2 sets of 5 pictures: a doll worth 10 cents, a pencil worth 1 cent, a beach ball worth 10 cents, a book 5 cents and a soccer ball worth 25 cents). so the object was for each child to go around twice and use their coin cards to exchange or purchase an object from the middle of the table. so for example, the child would use one of their coin cards, the 10 cent and exchange that card for the doll, saying "i want to buy..."
The lesson overall went well there were still students who were confused especially when they had to record what they bought in the worksheet. some wanted more than two turns while others were as usual distracted by other things. i think this classroom has been challenging for me because i always have to think outside the box and by this i mean that a lot of times i have had to as in the past improvise. i think though this is a great experience for me because i can see something like this happening in the future and fortunately i have completed my lessons successfully even though i did had to improvise some parts of the lesson. i think the climate of this classroom has also helped me think about what i will do if i do have students with severe behavioral problems, how will i accomodate with their needs and how will i still continue teaching the classroom. i think that i am very pleased that i am working with mrs. m because she has been of great support and she always gives us a heads up for how the classroom is behaving or how their behavior has changed, if any. i am looking forward to my next lesson on tuesday.