Teaching Our Unit, Day 1 (3/15/07)

We taught the first part of our economics lesson on wants and needs. We are teaching first grade and the economics SOLs cover the differences between goods and services, buyers and sellers, making choices, and saving money. The topic of needs and wants is actually addressed in kindergarten. However, our preassessment data showed that many of our students could not distinguish between needs and wants. In the questions they were asked, many of them wrote down the same exact item for both wants and needs. Thus, we thought that our students would benefit from a refresher of the subject since it is so connected to the SOLs we would be teaching.

In order to cover wants and needs, we had students sit in a circle and, one at a time, tell the rest of the class one of their needs. When they did this, Kelly (who was teaching this time- I was helping where needed but mostly observing) would discuss the item and classify it as one of the four basic needs: food, water, clothing, or shelter. Once the list was generally exhausted, the students took turns listing a want. The point of this was to show children that needs are limited while the list of wants would continue around the circle perhaps indefinitely unless the activity was forcibly ended. Afterwards, Kelly discussed some of the things the children brought up and extended the idea to conclude that needs, though varying by degree, will be similar no matter where children live. The students returned to their seats for a picture sort activity in which they cut out and arranged by category some pictures of different needs and wants. After discussing the activity, we collected their glued sorts to use as a formative assessment of their understanding of needs and wants.

I think Kelly did a great job teaching the lesson- for the most part, the students grasped the idea, which is an improvement from the preassessment. The difference, however, is that our preassessment consisted of constructed response items while this lesson’s formative assessment consisted of selected response items, and thus may have made it easier for the children to succeed. This is definitely something to take into consideration, both for the unit as a whole as well as for future formative assessments. Next time, we may want to make a formative assessment a constructed response item to see that students can generate the answers on their own. Only when the testing procedures are similar will we be able to really judge how much the students acquired.

One issue I had with the lesson was Kelly’s tendency to acknowledge a student’s remark with a smile and a statement of “good job.” I am not at all trying to criticize Kelly’s teaching methods, but I am bringing this issue up because I also find myself doing this a lot, and I want to ask any readers of this blog if you might have a solution to the problem. Kelly and I both want to make students feel appreciated and we want to encourage their participation in class. However, it is often hard to say more than “good job” to each student. To stop and discuss each response might be too time consuming, but to acknowledge responses with such seemingly casual and insignificant answers might result in a loss of student interest. Of course, for important ideas, we do stop and discuss with students- in this case, I am referring to student responses that are correct but may be redundant or not necessarily significant. Are there any suggestions of more meaningful ways to acknowledge student participation without losing instructional time?