Thursday, October 10, 2013

Perfect Day!

Bird's Eye View
Yesterday, we hit a milestone marker for being the most productive team ever!  We were very fortunate to be given the gift of time with our dear friend, expert, genius in mathematics - Ricky Mikelman.
Mini Lesson
 She came and helped up create 10 videos to use with our classroom.  It was such a great feeling because we had SO many questions on how to teach certain objectives - simply because the standards have raised and we are now doing more like 3rd grade math than 2nd grade math.  I think deep down inside, teachers are just naturally perfectionists.  We really want to do well at teaching a concept the first time.  I think I can probably speak on behalf of almost all teachers - there has been at least 1 lesson where we have failed miserably and had to  "retrain minds" after the fact.   Once this happens,  we just have this innate
knowledge on great first learnings.  So today, we did something that we usually do not know do - we took the time to "talk" out our lesson before we taped.  This was extremely helpful!
Another great "a-ha" that happened was to invite our administrators, iCoach and some wonderful student teachers to create a video.  It was a complete by-in!  I know our team really enjoyed it because it helped them understand what we have been doing.  I think that there is a lot of empathy for all the time being spent and they can now relate to us and how hard it is to stay after school when you are just flat-dab exhausted!
New Voices / Hands on Tape
Stay tuned for more exciting news that happened after school!

2 comments:

Melanie Marshall said...

Love, love the shots of what is going on behind the scene! Glad you all had a perfect day!!

Theresa said...

Thanks Melanie! I added all the videos to the server. It was so cool to have such a great group of people to share the experience with. Maybe we could do one together over the Christmas Holidays if you are around town. :)