This week, the school is doing something called "Penny Wars." Penny Wars is where each classroom collects pennies and silver coins. Silver coins are considered negative points, so you put them in other classrooms. The goal is to have the most points after every day! We unintentionally started a war with a third grade class, so we will be collecting coins to add to ours and subtract from others!!
For math, the students were working with timelines and adding and subtracting numbers. For the most part, it was review and students completed the work easily. I had to have extension enrich sheets for these students so they could keep working on the concept taught today. After specials, the students did something called Google Expeditions.
Google Expeditions is a really cool program where the students each have a pair of Virtual Reality goggles. Instead of having the students just look around, there is a teacher program where the teacher controls where the students are looking. As the students were looking at the screen, there is things on the teacher tablet to tell the students as they are looking. We did a Google Expedition on the Darkling Beetle. This lesson was very cool for the students because we just got our first Darkling Beetle yesterday from our Mealworms! So, the students discovered what the mealworms turn into, and know their full life cycle! Yesterday, when the student who had the beetle saw it, said, "Ms. Hertogs, what is that?!?" When I saw it was a beetle, I was excited that the students finally got to see the full life cycle! We have a few other mealworms in the pupae stage, but we are still waiting on a lot of them to change.
After lunch, it was a pretty typical afternoon. The students had literacy centers, where they were ok at, but were pretty noisy at times. WIN time was good for the students, and I am starting to take over that as well. To end the day, we had Social Studies. Today's lesson was a review of timelines, and I had the students research a famous person. After that, the students had to line up in date order and tell the rest of the class who their person was and what they did that was important. This lesson went ok, it was not structured very well on my part, but the students still got to learn new material!
Overall, today went well! I am starting to get sleep deprived working on my edTPA until late at night, so I am trying to not let that show in the classroom. During WIN time, I tried to make the lesson more interesting by acting more enthusiastic and excited to read, and it got the students excited too! They also got a bit crazy, so I had to maintain control while being fun as well.