What went well? What did you learn? Teaching this group has taught me so much. With this age group, I have a much better understanding of how to manage a classroom. I am much more confidence can react very quickly not to students who are losing focus or distracting others. I have also learned how to effectively deliver instruction to this age group. At first, I was unsure on how to word things or what their prior knowledge was on certain things. Now, I understand better their cognitive levels and how to lead discussions, lectures, and demonstrations. These students are much more advanced than I assumed and really absorb information quickly. Next, I have learned what this age group is interested in. Things like their interest in Pokemon cards surprised me while interests in things like trains and fairies I expected. Furthermore, I learned that these students were more excited about new materials rather than asked to make specific subject matter. These students were all great about exploring new mediums. Overall, I learned how much I loved working with this age group. Though it is sometimes tiring, I enjoyed every single class we taught and every student in that room.
What would you do differently? If I could change anything from our unit, there would only be three things: less emphasis on motion, better planning and better clean up. First, motion was relevant because that was a school-wide focus, but I wish we had not tried to incorporate that as much. The students did extremely well when working on storytelling and self-expression, and it felt like motion took out of that. Next, we were not always prepared. We did not always think through things like location, clean up, and materials. Planning is extremely important, and we would have had a lot less stress if we did better with it. Finally, we did not ask much from the students in terms of clean up. If I could go back, I would have spent more time directing students in a successful clean up so we did not have to spend so much time doing it ourselves.