Skip to main content

Learning Centers Reflection

I enjoyed creating my learning centers! I liked the format we used because it was easy to organize all my thoughts and made sure I thought out everything that I would need to do. I made my learning centers around games to make it fun for the students while they are also practicing addition skills. My learning centers are designed for students to practice addition after they have previously had more explicit instruction. This will also help the students master their math facts and be able to solve addition problems quickly. I liked that I got to be creative while doing this project and that it is something I can use in my classroom in the future. I also designed these learning centers to be able to be changed for different grade levels so students could practice subtraction or multiplication instead of addition without much extra work for the teacher. I liked that two of my learning centers were about adding numbers between 1 and 10 and my third learning center was about adding money so students are able to practice different skills and not get bored just doing addition problems. 

I also loved participating in other people’s learning centers because they were all so different and gave me a ton of ideas for my future classroom! I thought it was interesting that a lot of my peers chose to for their learning centers for 1st grade and I loved seeing all the different ideas they came up with for the same standards. 

One thing I would modify about my learning centers if I was doing them in a real elementary classroom (and not a college class) is that I would make all my handouts and directions more colorful and kid-friendly so they looked more interesting to the students. I would also include pictures in the directions for the students that can’t read. I might1 also include some hints for the center about counting money to scaffold it for my special education classroom.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ch 5:Pose Purposeful Questions

   Posing purposeful questions reminds me of the third CCSSM Standard which is Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others because teachers should pose purposeful questions to gauge student understanding and students communicate their understanding back to the teacher through their arguments of why they got the solution they did. There are five types of purposeful questions teachers ask students which are all used for different purposes. The first type of purposeful question is gathering information, which teachers use when want students to recall basic facts or definitions (mostly things that are memorization). This is a question used to assess students because it usually has a right and wrong answer and can help the teacher gauge whether or not the student understands. The second type of purposeful question is probing thinking, which is used when teachers want students to explain, elaborate, or clarify their thinking and reasoning and why they came up wit...

Grade Level Curriculum Reflection

     Through this year-long curriculum, I learned how important it is for teachers to plan ahead. There are so many standards that need to be covered throughout the year and the standards all vary in the length of time it will take to teach and for the students to master. Teachers need to plan for this and read through all the standards at the beginning of the year to make sure they have time to get to everything. I have been in math classes before (more in middle school) that seem to be so rushed at the end of the year which could have been due to the teacher’s lack of a year-long curriculum plan. Obviously, other things could have come up or lessons took longer than my teacher thought, but it still reminds me of the importance of having a plan because I know how stressed I was when I had to learn concepts too quickly and didn't have time to master them before the tests. I also learned how important it is to review standards from the previous grade because they tie in so...

Ch 4: Build Procedural Fluency from Conceptual Understanding

A conceptual understanding of math is essential for students to be successful in math classes throughout their life. To me, conceptual understanding is the basics of math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, equalities, etc), why these concepts work, how they work together, and then being able to remember and draw from these concepts in more complex problems. In order for students to gather conceptual understanding, they need to be willing and ready to learn and they also need to believe in themselves and their intelligence. The teacher's role is to be the expert but to guide students toward these understandings and not simply state them like facts, or else students will memorize them and not understand why these concepts work and why they are important in the future.  Procedural fluency is the ability to use equations, representations, manipulatives, etc to solve a simple problem. The word simple is relative to the child’s grade level and also their academic level. Fo...