Monkey in the Middle

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Today in math class the lesson was about 'median.' I'm seeing a pattern to REM's method of teaching, and that pattern is FUN! By making her lesson fun and memorable, the students, especially our integrated students, will hopefully retain more of the lessons. This is crucial as well, because the lessons are so short and they only get covered fully in one day (with review days, of course!).

For the lesson on median, REM asked a few children to come up and hold a few large index cards with numbers on them. Her first two groups consisted of 5 children, and one more came up and used the green sparkly pointer (with a pointing finger on the end) to "knock off" the students on the ends. This left one child standing, thus, the MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE! REM and SPEM then proceeded to play the age old game of keep-away. The class loved it! Even Evan got in front of the class and participated. :)

Speaking of Evan, he and I spent some time together today. His aid was called elsewhere (he still doesn't have a one-to-one) and SPEM asked if I would go with him to see if the principal would let him work with a younger classroom. We spent some time playing blocks with a Kindergarten class before going outside for recess. Evan wanted to show a girl in the class the school garden, and so the three of us spent recess there. All in all, it was a great 30 minutes we spent together.

In science, it was the last day to build and test their structures. One group reached 14 dictionaries before theirs was crushed. However, one of the other classes had 35 dictionaries stacked on their structure, blowing everyone out of the water!

Social studies was the same (find the text feature based on this clue), and in language arts, they started talking about journals. We did get to our read aloud today, and I continued with Night of the Twisters, by Ivy Ruckman. Using the microphone with the class gathered around me in the directors chair, we were introduced to Dan on his Black Letter Day...