Teaching Day ONE; done!

So today was our first day of teaching!!!

We have been preparing non stop for the last two and a half weeks. Constantly in the library day and night, writing, editing, changing and revising our lesson and activities! Today we taught a direct/inquiry lesson to the students. We were feeling very prepared and ready to take this on. We faced our first challenge when we got to the classroom and found out that that particular classroom did not get wifi. This meant that the powerpoint and our Voki would not be able to play. I think this really crushed our spirits and we were thrown off guard. We had an older version that was not as good as our final powerpoint saved to one of our computers so we used that. I think if we would have had our final powerpoint the lesson would have been more interactive for the students. The first part of our lesson, which was teaching the vocabulary, I would say went pretty well. The students were able to keep up with the slideshow and filling out their vocabulary activity.

We had a Voki whose name was Ms. Mineral, ask the students for help to identify some minerals.

Since there was no wifi we could only show a picture of Ms. Mineral, but the students seemed to really love it. I think if the Voki was able to be played, they would have enjoyed it even more. The students were split into groups with a teacher candidate in each group to facilitate. The students were responsible to perform a streak and scratch test on the minerals. They also had to identify other characteristics of the minerals such as luster and transparency. They are a really smart bunch of students so they were able to do this activity very accurately! They also really seemed to enjoy getting the chance to work hands-on with the minerals! 

Overall, I think we did pretty well. We could have prepared better for the circumstance of the internet not working. The other issue at hand was that we spent time splitting the students into groups for differentiated teaching. Putting students who we thought would work best together based on aspects such as behavior and capabilities. Unfortunately, that was on our final Powerpoint, so the groups were just based off of the students placements in the classroom at the time.I think our next cooperative lesson will be much more successful. Now we have the experience of working with these students and we know what to do! This is all a learning process and experience so we will learn more as we go!