Teaching Moments

Still establishing my classroom structure and whatnot, but I feel like I am learning quickly about what to do and what not to do.  This week, there have been a few great teaching moments:

• Math One-on-One.  With seven students, my math group is quite manageable in size.  The biggest challenge is the language barrier--I have the half of the class that struggles the most with English or are the newest language learners.  Yesterday, though, I had the chance to work with one of the students one-on-one while the class was correcting mistakes.  This particular student loves writing down answers without showing his work, and sometimes I know they come from the board rather than his head.  Thus, I asked him to explain how he arrived at the answers to several problems, slightly afraid it was going to be a long session of pulling teeth to get him to speak in English (even though he is one of the stronger speakers).  But he surprised me--he explained his steps without complaining about the language, and we caught a couple of mistakes he made and fixed them.  I think he was pretty proud of himself, and I think he has finally caught on that I want him to show me his work.  I must say I was quite pleased with him, too.

• English Partners.  Today we worked on reading multi-syllable words with short vowels correctly.  I paired the students up and gave them ten flashcards per pair--they had to take turns reading the words aloud.  When they were finished, I gave them a new set of cards.  Taking advice I had read somewhere and had heard from a friend about activity length, I kept it to about eight minutes of practice and was able to move them to the next task before they got too squirrelly.  And as I walked around and listened in, it sounded like they were doing well with their pronunciation!  More practice tomorrow.