While I would like everyone to believe that I am a super-mega-teacher and that everyday in my class goes perfect and smooth, not all days work the way I would like for them to. Sometimes many factors work against my ability to teach or for the lesson to go as planned.
Yesterday, I gave them each a copy of a hand that I had written different integers on. There are actually many different things that you could do with these “integer hands.” Because I had other things I wanted to do, all we did was find the sum of the integers on the hand and then the students stood up in front of the classroom and ordered themselves from least to greatest.
The next activity that we did was to play a card game called “Opposites Attract.” It took a while to get the rules explained, and I actually ended up having to go around to each group and explaining it and playing their hands individually. The directions to the game was that you take out all of the face cards, not including the Ace. Shuffle the cards and pass them out so that each player has five cards. The rest go in a pile in the middle of the group, and the top card is flipped over making a discard pile. The first player has their option of choosing from the discarded pile or from the top of the deck. The object of the game is to make “opposites” using either two or three cards. Red cards are negative and black cards are positive. Aces have the value of 1. For example…..if I have a black six, I need to have either a 1)red 6, 2) red 4 and red 2, 3)red 3 and red 3, or 4)red 5 and a red 1. The player lays his “book” down and scores 5 points for each book. The player then discards one card out of his hand and play turns to the next player. The game ends when one player has no cards left in his hand. While the game was fun and the students enjoyed playing the game…….it took a while to get them to understand the rules and procedures to playing the game. I’m still unsure that all groups are playing it correctly. This is the problem with having large classes and only one teacher.
Today I started out giving them an activity I thought would be really cool. It’s called “ABC Terrific”. Each group was given a chart with the alphabet. Each letter was assigned an integer. They were also given a series of cards that had different silly statements on them. For example, one card asked them to list ten words that related to Thanksgiving. They had to list the words, find the sum of their integers, and then order them from least to greatest. During my first hour, some of the students complained. It made me upset that they would complain. I know, I know, you aren’t suppose to be upset with a bunch of sixth graders, but by golly I work pretty hard finding them cool activities to do instead of just giving them a giant worksheet with a bunch of problems on it. Third and fourth hours I split the class time up. For half of the class they played “Opposites Attract” and the last half they played “ABC Terrific”. It seemed to work a little better that way.
The point to the title of this post is that while many of my days work smoothly and my lessons, for the most part, go as planned…….every day is a winding road. I tend to have to change and accommodate to make things work to my liking.