First Day of Teaching

Today we had our first day of teaching our fifth-grade students at Bishop Dunn Memorial School.  My group mates and I were very excited to start teaching the students about Christopher Columbus.  The first lesson that we taught we used direct instruction so that we could get all the important information to the students.  When the students came in from recess they were very eager to start learning about Columbus!

We first started off our lesson by establishing ground rules for the class to follow so that things would not get out of control when it came to the different parts of our lesson.  We had a silent method to get the students attention but throughout the lesson, we found that it did not really work because a lot of the students were not really paying attention to what was going on up front. We then moved into our presentation.  The students seemed to be really engaged in the lesson but I feel that we could have called on different students to answer our questions.  Often times it was the same students raising their hands.  Another thing that I think we could have done differently is check with the whole class once a student answered the question.  This way we know that the whole class is paying attention and that they also know the answer to the question that we just asked.  A couple of times we would use the thumbs up/thumbs down method to get a response from the whole class.

After we had finished our powerpoint presentation we moved on to guided practice with the students.  For this, we had a Columbus web and a Columbian Exchange poster.  We had the students brainstorm in their groups for facts and other things about Columbus that they could put on the web.  One thing that we could have done differently is instead of having the students say something from their seats and having us write it on the web we could have them come up to the board and write it.  Another activity that we had for the students was a Columbian Exchange poster where the students came up and put the things that Columbus brought back and forth throughout his voyages.  The students seemed to really be engaged in both of the activities that we had for them.

It was a really good first day of teaching!  The students learned a lot about Christopher Columbus and they are going to learn even more in the next two lessons that we have planned for them!