Teaching Our Unit, Day 4 (3/29/07)

Today, I taught our lesson on savings. First, I did an interactive read-aloud of The Berenstain Bears' Trouble With Money, emphasizing the lesson that the bear cubs learned about money by the end of the book. We discussed how needs and wants affect the way people save money and noted the choices that the cubs made in dealing with their money. The students were really interested in the book until the very end when the discussion may have become tedious for them. However, I continue to have the same problem in my teaching over and over agan. I prepare so thoroughly for my lesson and I get so focused on how I am presenting the material that I end up losing track of the students, which is really the most fundamental part of any lesson. What I mean is that I start calling on the same students who always raise their hands while forgetting to bring in the stragglers. In addition, I still struggle with the best way to effectively grab the attention of the students who start to lose interest. I feel a little overwhelmed in balancing my concentration on my own lesson while managing students' participation. I would appreciate any advice on how to handle this...

The rest of the lesson, I felt, was pretty successful. We led students on a "journey" in which they helped me make choices between different objects to purchase while trying to save enough money for a goal object. There were a lot of elements in action but I think everything was tied together pretty well. Each student had a sign that was labeled with "spend" on one side and "save" on the other side, which they used to vote on whether or not to purchase objects along the way. We had tangible objects on display for the students to 'choose' from, such as a basketball, a book, items of food, flowers, candy, etc. In addition, the students had sheets on which they recorded the decisions that were made at each stop so that we could later discuss togetehr what were mart choices and what may have been done differently. I kept a budget recorded on the baord to help us keep track. Also, I used green paper for dolalr bills in an attempt to use as many visuals in order to bring the activity together. The students were very engaged in the activity, excited to vote and to record the choices made along the journey. Compared to our last lesson, I am very happy with the outcome this week because we figured out how to have an interactive learning experience without having total chaos. Because we did this activity as a class but still allowed for individual participation, we were better able to manage the classroom and ensure that students were productive.