Friday

I finally got to teach my first two lessons. I did a spelling test and I taught math using M&M’s. Spelling was okay. I felt I did an okay job with that. Math, however, please shoot me now. Most of the students followed directions, but the ones who did not really messed the project up and could not understand why they messed up. I thought it was really very simple to say: “Don’t open your baggie until you have a paper towel.” Apparently, I need to give out the towels before I give out the baggies full of M&M’s. Another way I would improve this lesson is the wording. I would have used some different terminology. Instead of saying what is the difference between what you guessed and how many M&M’s were in the bag, I would have said if you guessed more M&M’s, how many more did you guess. If you guessed fewer, how many more were in the bag. Another improvement that I would have done would have been to take a baggie around and have the students write down how many M&M’s they thought were in the bag and then give each student a bag to count. Instead of that, I gave them a bag and told them to guess. That was a bad mistake on my part. Now, I know what to do. I asked the kids if they liked using M&M’s to count and all of them did. I think their favorite part was eating the M&M’s. One aspect I remembered: some kids might be allergic to peanuts, so I used plain M&M’s. I was so proud of myself for remembering this at Wal-Mart last night.