Fractions

Hello!

This week has been in school Mon, Tues and Thurs for Serial Placement 2.

On Monday I taught an English lesson to the whole class on the Box of Delights, which is the book they are reading. We spent half the lesson watching episode 2 of the BBC Series DVD, so I discovered that they use the IWB as a TV too and play the DVD through the computer, this is rather handy as you don't have the health and safety of moving a tv around the school and having the time constrainsts of booking it out to use, or having to move the classroom around to fit the whole year in at once to maximise the time.

On Tuesday I taught a whole class lesson of Maths, which was I thought a bit of a disaster that was totally my fault! I had spent 5 hours planning, researching and preparing my lesson on Monday night and had a really good lesson, all I had to do was photocopy cards that I wanted to play a game with, cut them up and sort them so that they were ready for the children to match equivalent fractions.... this all sounded so easy that I wasn't prepared for the mild panic that ensued. When I had photocopied 15, one between two, I realised just how many now needed to be cut, the school's guillotine was awful, and hacked at the paper as I tried to get as many sheets through as possible, I had to cut the individual cards with scissors, in chunks, which still took ages and then I realised that they were all mixed up and had to be sorted!! Luckily I have a very good TA in my class and while the children were in Carol Practice he sorted them for me while I set-up the rest of the lesson, but by this stage I was all flustered and had lost my thread. Thankfully when the children came back I was ready and the TA was continuing to sort the cards. The lesson started with an activity on the IWB using a maths programme that I have forgotten the name of, but it allows you to make shapes then divide them up and colour in certain sections. I had the children coming up to the front to first of all pull the shapes apart to see what fraction of the shape was shaded in red, then moving the partitions onto another shape to see equivalent fractions. It was really helpful. I did realise that much more practice is needed on IWB though, as I kept holding the pen when the children were trying to drag and ended up with finger mark smears all over the place!! The children were great though and kept telling me how to use it, I think they found it quite amusing!
I also used Knowledge Box to play a maths mansion video on fractions, which is a very good resource for maths as well as other subjects. The card game was actually okay, until I realised that the cards were still all in the wrong combinations. I certainly learnt that next time I need to think about how to organise them better!!!

See you next week....