Sunday, March 18, 2007

Teaching Our Unit, Day 2 (3/16/07)

On the second day of our unit, I taught while Kelly observed and helped where necessary. In this lesson, we covered the concepts of goods, services, buyers, and sellers. After reviewing the previous day’s lesson, I read a picture book called Rent Party Jazz by William Miller. The book was about a boy whose mom lost her job, but they needed money because the day when they were to pay rent was fast approaching. The boy made friends with a trumpet player who told him about rent parties. In a rent party, the whole neighborhood would gather at one house where there would be some live music and lots of food that was contributed by neighbors. The attending people would drop money into a bucket in appreciation of the party, and this money was given to the host to pay for their rent. The boy in the story put on a rent party with the help of the trumpet player, and he was able to raise enough money for the rent. I thought this was a great book to bring together the concept of need with the idea of providing a service in order to earn money. After the interactive read aloud, I continued a discussion about all these concepts.

The second part of my lesson followed the integrative model. I made a poster with pictorial representations of different goods and services and asked the students to come up with conclusions based on the poster. Through this, we were also able to explore the concept of buyers and sellers, specifically identifying the buyer and seller in the interactions of services. I also had the students fill out their own “dictionaries” of economics terms to use as a reference in later lessons. Our teacher seems to focus a lot on the awareness of important definitions through recitation-type activities, so we thought this would be a good way to incorporate her teaching methods. But first I had the students help me create a definition for each word as a class based on the preceding lesson. Ideally, this participation helped the students by giving more meaning to each concept. Finally, we included a constructed response type of formative assessment in which students gave us examples of goods and services.

The biggest problem with my lesson was its frequent tendency to lose the children’s attention. This particular lesson included the bulk of the unit’s information, much of it that needed to be explicitly taught and explained. We tried our best to come up with activities that would engage the students as much as possible, and we thought the read aloud would be an interesting way to introduce some of the concepts. I was able to elicit participation from the children, but I found that they were simultaneously very fidgety and restless. Teaching kids this young is quite a challenge because they do not appreciate being told to sit still for so many hours. Yet, there are times when the information must be taught before it can be interacted, and these are the times I lost their attention the most. We will really try to have more engagement in future lessons. For example, we plan to have the third lesson involve an instructional game for most of the time that we are teaching. It will be interesting to see how involved the kids will be during that lesson. But the attention span of these children will always be an issue- it is impossible to always have them playing games. There must be some helpful solution to grab their attention at times when the information needs to be explicitly taught.

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