Thursday, May 7, 2009

Time is up! Food in a day!

We have just completed a task that was set to be completed in approxiamately 50 minutes.  Some students are looking exhausted, some happy, some lost and some very frustrated.

We had to put together a presentation that would show what food we ate in a day with a conclusion or reflection on whether the food we ate was good for us according to the food pyramid.

Here's how the students felt about this task - having only 50 minutes to complete it.
-Confusing
-fun
-frustrating
-difficult
-hard
-under pressure
-alright
-'got my brain working'
-interesting
-complicated 
-challenging
-awesome
-easy

What did this task challenge to do?
-Get it completed!
-Focus on the rubric
-Pressure to get recording ourselves right
-Focus on the most important part of task - which WASN'T to make it pretty!
-making real attempts to finish
-challenged my mind

There's more to come!

Time is up! Food in a day!

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Speak to me!

Zooming around, helping this and that child with things - now that I have a moment to reflect - they could have and should have fixed the problem they had independently! But time is ticking and I can't wait!

No it's not me being grumpy - on reflection I kept the 'Mrs T will fix it quickly' going, rather than get the 'student to work it out'. In our rush to get the job done, we are at fault causing our children to often not work things through to the end as we 'don't have the time' to wait around for it to happen?

Due to the 'rush' behaviour, I think it's helped the culture of pointing, grunting and incomplete sentences to rise. Now being more concious of the almost nil response or clear requests that need to be made when needing assistance, I am reminding myself and those I help to 'speak to me'. I've failed to pick this up often. I am making more of an effort to remind myself and my students that we must speak in a clear and concise manner to assist each other.

How have you been communicating in class? Have you found yourself in the same situation? Overcome it? Never had this problem?