This week our main focus in math was money recognition and amount. I have been working hard using games, white board tools, whole group instruction and more to discuss these coins and how we can tell them apart from one another. There is one student in particular who is really struggling with recognizing the coins. I knew she was having difficulty, so I tried to incorporate activities into the lesson that would help the higher students as well as the ones still struggling. For example, each day this week I picked a new coin to observe. We would think about the coin, its size, color, the important people on the front and backs of the coins, etc. I did this to help all the students, but specifically for my one student who is still struggling to find the difference between a quarter and a nickel. As I was doing this, the student was extremely disinterested so we had to turn to another method. The nice thing about having two teachers in a room is you are able to do more “catch-up” with your students. While I am teaching whole group, reviewing the previous day’s topic or another activity, my host teacher was able to pull aside this particular student and work one-on-one with her. She provided the student with an incentive to help motivate the student to learn the coins. Coin stickers, coin stamps, and the use of real money are all things that helped the student to see the importance of change and open her eyes on a personal level. She was motivated to learn for herself. It was very interesting to watch from my end, the level of interest before and after. It was very neat to see a different approach to one on one instruction to help motivate a student in an area of need. Throughout the week you could see her looking for coins and wanted to come up and tell us what the coin was and how much it was worth. She also wanted to participate in the math lessons involving money, which showed she felt more confident. That’s an exciting moment!
This week our main focus in math was money recognition and amount. I have been working hard using games, white board tools, whole group instruction and more to discuss these coins and how we can tell them apart from one another. There is one student in particular who is really struggling with recognizing the coins. I knew she was having difficulty, so I tried to incorporate activities into the lesson that would help the higher students as well as the ones still struggling. For example, each day this week I picked a new coin to observe. We would think about the coin, its size, color, the important people on the front and backs of the coins, etc. I did this to help all the students, but specifically for my one student who is still struggling to find the difference between a quarter and a nickel. As I was doing this, the student was extremely disinterested so we had to turn to another method. The nice thing about having two teachers in a room is you are able to do more “catch-up” with your students. While I am teaching whole group, reviewing the previous day’s topic or another activity, my host teacher was able to pull aside this particular student and work one-on-one with her. She provided the student with an incentive to help motivate the student to learn the coins. Coin stickers, coin stamps, and the use of real money are all things that helped the student to see the importance of change and open her eyes on a personal level. She was motivated to learn for herself. It was very interesting to watch from my end, the level of interest before and after. It was very neat to see a different approach to one on one instruction to help motivate a student in an area of need. Throughout the week you could see her looking for coins and wanted to come up and tell us what the coin was and how much it was worth. She also wanted to participate in the math lessons involving money, which showed she felt more confident. That’s an exciting moment!
ReplyDeleteHow neat to see such a change! But how do we pull that off with only one adult in the room? That is the difficult part of our day.
ReplyDeleteHow can we get 2 teachers per room to do these things all year??? Kids would be closer to being on level with this!!!
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