There's a New Deputy in Town!

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Today I taught a few math classes. I was only supposed to teach our homeroom, integrated class, but REM was out sick, so SPEM and I took over for the class. Today's lesson was two digit by one digit multiplication. The way REM teaches this is by Cowboy Math. So...there's a new deputy in town (the one digit) and he needs to lasso up the bandits out there. So he rounds up the ones column first, and if the product is two digits, then the puts the ones digit in jail (below the equal line), but uses the tens digit to help him find the rest of the bandits, so he goes above the tens of the two digit number with a plus sign in front of him. Then the deputy lassos the tens digit, and then adds his friend before putting him in jail. I wore a cowboy hat and used the lingo. The class loved it! (I was much better the second time, but SPEM helped me with our class, who I taught first.)

On top of that, today was the second TEAM TIME for the "all set" students. This week was grammar, and Sunshine asked me to make up a paragraph with grammatical and punctuation errors for them to correct. I took a passage from Harry Potter and the Scorcher's Stone and concentrated on object and subject pronouns as well as capitalization and punctuation. They had a blast correcting! It was so fun to walk around the room and see them concentrating and working well with friends to correct the passage. So today, we went over the mistakes on the overhead, with class participation. So fun!