Fractions Lesson

Monday my teacher asked me if I could do a fraction lesson with the students Tuesday morning while she worked on some tests to type up. I jumped at the chance, I wanted to be able to work with the students and while I had done a lot of work with them on Monday, Tuesday was going to be a whole new experience.

When she asked me to do a fractions lesson I of course had no idea what they already knew and if they had already talked about fractions so luckily for me my 4^th graders just did fractions before I left so I was already  to go. At home to introduce fractions we worked with making fraction strips so students could compare the sizes, why not do it here. I went home Monday and started cutting; 240 strips! Yeah I know I’m crazy. And I must have forgotten how difficult it was to work with 27 students at home folding, 40 was so bad. They were all on different steps and they wouldn’t listen to what I wanted them to do next. It was mad chaos in my eyes, Sean thought it wasn’t that bad and my students LOVED it!

I taught them a quieting skill, time out, on Friday and it worked really well until today. I had to quiet them every time I went to a new fraction strip and this then wasted their time to finish their pen pal letters today, which they were really upset about but I had warned them that they would lose finishing their letters if they did not get their fractions done. I felt bad giving them a threat but I knew something needed to be done. When I have to raise my voice higher than I need to when I get mad at my friends something is not right. In the setting I felt so off raising my voice to students, that is rarely ever done in schools in America and the worst part was that my students were not responding to it or anything at that. So we are back to square one about the quieting skill and in my next lesson I will go in with a respect talk to make sure we are all on the same page.

I have to remember too how lucky I was in the past 10 weeks in the states to have such a great class. For the most part I never had much of a noise issue to deal with, but how they acted was instilled on day one of school and that is not the case here. Things are very different. It’s frustrating but I need to remember to not let it make me to upset because I cannot change everything in my time here. My friends at Ida’s Valley have been great in helping me when I was really upset and worn out about my morning, they even offered to come help me but I had hoped for better when I came back from break, and I got just that for the most part.

So the lesson while it was good for the students, it was not exactly what I wanted them to know and learn. I wanted them to explore more with comparing fractions and see that some are equal and the fraction strips work so well for that, but once again it’s a step in the right direction to get them engaged in a lesson.

For 20minutes when they were silent today I remembered how golden silence is when all I ever hear is chatter.