Workshop 4 EDI 331

Growing as a teacher is my main goal for this semester. Part of that is getting better at creating lesson plans for a single day and for multiple days. When I create lesson plans first I know I need to make sure I cover the material that I need to teach. Second is finding a creative way of doing it. I do not want to be that teacher who lectures everyday while students take notes. There will have to be days where that is the only thing we do but it does not have to be a daily thing. I want to work on creating activities that students will enjoy and that push them to problem solve. I want them to think about the problem and work together to figure it out.

Let me give you an example of what I mean from my teacher assisting observations. My CT creative an activity for students to work together at their tables (groups of 3 or 4). The problem had a map with street names on it. The problem stated that there were two boys who had two-way radios that only worked within a 4-block radius. The problem stated where each boy lived and asked if they would be able to communicate with each other from their houses. Students were given a big piece of paper to draw their solution on to share with the class. Walking around most groups first thought that the answer was no because if you walked straight left, right, up, or down, then the number of blocks between each house was 5 blocks. However, as students started to discuss the problem more, students started to realize that radio waves don’t travel by street block and instead can go straight through (over) houses.

This activity was to get students thinking about the distance formula. If you drew out the picture and connect the houses and streets, it made a right triangle. We knew the lengths of the sides of the triangle but not the hypotenuse length. Some students actually knew how to find it and use formulas to find a numerical answer. These are the types of activities that I want to create because it got students to problem solve and look deeper into the problem.