Date: March 30, 2023

By: Shaylee Marr

Hello everyone, today was another amazing and interesting day within my field experience classroom! For this class, I attempted to complete the day while being completely active ever second I could including within dropping the students off and walking with them to the class. As the day began, I went into the classroom and began with the bellringer. After the bellringer, I began to teach the math lesson in which I began to practice for when I would teach my math lesson to the students. The students were learning about fractions. The metaphor used within the math lesson was about pizzas. When teaching the students, I tried to make the lesson connect as much as possible to the students learning and everyday lives so they have a better understanding of the content. When reading the questions I would say something like, “Mrs. Dare and I have a large pizza, how would you cut or divide the pizza so that we each had equal parts?” Then the students would use their whiteboards to draw out an image of their pizza and how they divided it. Once all the students held up their whiteboards, I would call on a student to show their board and explain why they cut or divided their pizza in the way that they did. If a student cut their pizza diagonally and another did it horizontally, I would ask them both to show their boards and then ask the class, “Is there a difference within the way A cut their pizza versus how B cut their pizza? Does it change how much pizza each person gets?” After asking this, I would discuss the answer with the students.

As the math lesson continues, I gave the student interesting facts about me so they are more motivated to answer the questions while also making it more challenging. For example, when talking about dividing a pizza in 4 ways, I said, “Now this one may be tough friends. If I have 4 brothers, and I want to share the pizza I bought equally between my 4 brothers. How would I do that friends?” I then gave the students a few minutes to draw it out on their whiteboard then after they finished I asked a student to share. With this method, I was able to gather a better understanding of what the students understood able creating parts farther than halves. After asking this question, I noticed one student gave an interesting answer. The student said, “If you have 4 brothers, can you slice the pizza in 5 ways so you and your 4 brothers can each have an equal piece?” When the student asked this, this lead to another discussion and I asked the students what it would look like if I were to cut the pizza in even parts for 5 people. From this lesson, the students learned a lot about the fractions and dividing items from wholes into parts.

Overall, today’s lesson was successful and the students gained a lot of experience from their own questioning and discussions. The students were especially active within their lessons today and seemed to have a nice time taking part in their math discussions. In conclusion, the lesson was fun and interesting but per usual there are always things that can be done to make the lesson better. I will use what I have done for this week’s observation and participation in order to guide my teaching experiences for the future. Until next time friends!