Our last day!

         Our teaching week was definitely stressful but I am glad we ended on a good lesson. For our last lesson we did a cooperative learning lesson. To introduce this lesson, we explained to the students what a community is and why a community is important. The next thing we asked the students was if they knew what it meant to work collaboratively. I was not expecting any of the students to know what this meant but there was one student who rose his hand. He said that it meant to work together. This was just the answer we were looking for. We went on to explain how to work in groups and the different jobs to make the group function better. the students were very excited that they were going to be able to work in groups and they did not even know what the activity was yet. To start off our lesson, we had a Voki presentation. This Voki was an alien asking the students what was a community and if they could help him teach the people on his planet what a community was. The students loved the Voki and they were ready to accept their mission.

Click me to hear me talk!

           After the Voki the students were a little excited and did not listen to the full directions of the projects. I think it would have been a good idea to at least introduce the project a little bit before playing the Voki so then students would pay attention more to the directions. The students were given 14 buildings in a bag and they had to decide what important services they had to put in their community. The students could color the buildings and then glue them onto a street to show what their community would look like. After all of the groups were done making their communities, they would have to show their community to the "zoning committee" to see if their community was ready for construction. Although the students really seemed to enjoy this lesson, we did have a few minor problems. The students were rushed because our introduction took up too much time. It would have been better if their was less buildings and if they were already colored in. Once the students were able to start coloring the buildings they lost the concept of what they were doing. 

Another problem we came into was that we did not explain to the students about the group processing sheets they were supposed to fill out at the end of the lesson. We should have told the students before they started working on their lessons that they would be evaluating themselves and their group on how well they worked together. There was some confusion on these sheets and most the the students gave their groups 5's on everything. 

If we had more time on our lesson, it would have turned out much better and not have been so rushed in time. I do think the cooperating teacher as well as the students enjoyed our lessons. It was a challenge but it helped me learn a lot about the different types of lesson plans