awesome observation

i decided at 2:30am that today i would have the students design their own theme park rides.

i came up with a project proposal form in a matter of minutes and wrote up a lesson plan in less than 5.

why is it that my best ideas come to me at the worst possible times, and only take me minutes to write up and plan for? i should just sit down for 15 minutes a night and do what i need to do at normal hours.

so my class learned about disjointed inequalities today and practiced. then they proposed and sketched theme park rides of their own. they needed to impose height restrictions on their rides and make an inequality to represent it (and justify their reasoning as well.) tomorrow they will put their plans to chart paper and draw them up.

my kids had sooooo much fun with it, and i really got to see their personalities shine. they came up with some interesting and crazy ideas too. i look forward to seeing them finish tomorrow.

during my observation, i used 40 minutes for the warm up, mini lesson, practice, and discussions before group work. the kids were excited and engaged. two kids put there heads down and i woke them up with a bang. they debated the math, as well as semantics and meanings of words. they were raising their hands for every question. even my of the boat ELL student answered a question using her hands to simulate inequalities because she couldn't answer in english just yet.

from bell to bell i used every second and once we moved on to group work, the kids went right to it without any prodding. they did everything asked of them and i was able to wrap up with a couple of summary questions.

when i finished, the first word my professor said was "wow." i thought he was wowing the kids (they're a bit attitude-filled and feisty) but now, he was wowing that lesson. then he said "that lesson hit on everything i could ever want a teacher to do."

he went on to go through the lesson piece by piece and praise it. but i realized why it ended up being so good... the motivational hook. i never think too much about the motivations but my professor emailed me earlier this week reminding me that he would be looking at how i handle motivating my students. so yesterday and today i used the amusement park theme and drew in the kids from the first step.

i know that i need to really think hard so i can hook my kids with every lesson because it clearly works wonders. i just only wish my AP had stepped in, because he promised me he would pop in either today or tomorrow to observe.!