Whoops!

This week is the first time I "officially" took over one subject in the fourth grade classroom. I have been teaching lessons since fall, but seldom had I planned and taught mostly on my own. I say mostly because my mentor teacher is wonderful and helps by guiding me (helping me to determine how long to spend on a topic) and offering me resources.

This week I am implementing math. It is probably the subject I am most hesitant about, as I do not view myself as a strong mathematician. The way I see it, by starting it first, I have that much more time to learn how to teach it and sharpen my mathematical skills. Today our lesson was on quadrilaterals. I had a neat SMART board lesson planned with interactive activities throughout the lesson in addition to a flow chart on various quadrilaterals. I had looked online to see if the SMART tech website already had a lesson on quadrilaterals before I created my own. I did end up using one slide from another teacher's creation and I added to it what I wanted to cover. Upon getting to school I realize that the flash drive I had saved my SMART slides on was still in my computer back at my apartment. Whoops! Thank goodness I write lesson plans so that a substitute should be able to pick them up and read them. Because of this, I had the questions and material on each slide written into my lesson plans and I was able to improvise. It was not as fun as I had planned, but it worked and the students learned the information. The students were able to do the sort the quadrilaterals slide, that I had used from the SMART tech website, so not all was lost. And I have a great SMART lesson on quadrilaterals for the future :D