Anyone who has ever taken an education course has probably heard something like this; "make sure you keep this activity and use it when you're in a pinch, add it to your bag of tricks" or "add it to your toolkit" or "keep it in your back pocket." As I get further along into my teaching experience I have had more opportunities to open this "bag of tricks."
This week was a perfect example of that: Upon my arrival to school, I realized that my fantastic lesson on Renaissance artwork, which was entirely reliant on the use of very colorful and entertaining Renaissance artwork postcards, would have to be post-poned; I left the postcards at home! My first reaction was utter panic - I had about 50 minutes to either re-work that lesson or scrap it and make up something else. As I was really proud of my work on the original lesson, I decided to whip up something else instead. So I did an introduction to some of the great Renaissance thinkers Francesco Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci. Now lecturing and having students take notes is straightforward, but the "bag-of-tricks" idea was pretty great. As most historians know, Leonardo was famous for mirror-writing, or writing all of his letters and words backwards from right-left across a page. So I demonstrated this for my students on the board (being left-handed myself I used to practice this when I was bored in class, I've developed a certain skill) and they were fascinated. So I told them to try writing a sentence using this mirror-writing technique. Then, as I knew would be the case with adolescent females, a few girls whipped out their mirrors and they were passed around the class so people could see how well they'd done. A simple fun fact turned into a 10 minute activity that truly engaged the students in the subject matter - DEFINITELY keeping that in my bag of tricks.
While I usually try to keep my posts to one major topic, I just can't help but mention my first experience with student assemblies. Today, each grade met during a different period to receive information about their course selections for next year. Most teachers didn't remember this was occurring until yesterday afternoon, and most thought it would last the entire period.
Fast forward to this morning, teachers find out that the assembly only lasts about 20 minutes and I am teaching a class in 15 minutes that I have NOTHING prepared for... (might I add this is only my 2nd time teaching this class) Luckily, my cooperating teacher opened up her bag of tricks and saved the day.
So, I guess I really only had one topic, but I finally understand why my teachers in high school would get so frustrated and dread assembly days; not even a math teacher can formulate how to lesson plan for a class period that is lasting x amount of minutes starting at t time with a 50% margin of error...
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| image - translorial.com |
While I usually try to keep my posts to one major topic, I just can't help but mention my first experience with student assemblies. Today, each grade met during a different period to receive information about their course selections for next year. Most teachers didn't remember this was occurring until yesterday afternoon, and most thought it would last the entire period.
Fast forward to this morning, teachers find out that the assembly only lasts about 20 minutes and I am teaching a class in 15 minutes that I have NOTHING prepared for... (might I add this is only my 2nd time teaching this class) Luckily, my cooperating teacher opened up her bag of tricks and saved the day.
So, I guess I really only had one topic, but I finally understand why my teachers in high school would get so frustrated and dread assembly days; not even a math teacher can formulate how to lesson plan for a class period that is lasting x amount of minutes starting at t time with a 50% margin of error...
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