Third Times the Charm

   This week was finally my group's turn to go! Our direct lesson went pretty smoothly, but we ended up running out of time for our independent practice. When we practiced our lesson the night before, we ended up having so much extra time each time we practices, so we tried to go through everything slower when we were actually teaching and I guess we went too slow! Our powerpoint definitely lasted too long and started to bore some of the kids because we were just talking to them for 30-40 minutes. We had checks for understanding after every couple of slides, so the students would have time to participate, but it wasn't enough. We also should have circulated the room more to make sure that the students were staying on track. Some of the teachers also kept forgetting to have the students write words down on their note sheets, so we had to keep going back which wasted some time and made the lesson seem a little disorganized. I think our direct lesson was successful overall, even though we had a few minor mistakes.
   We were the first group to successfully get through both lessons including our independent practices!! Time management is definitely one of the hardest parts about teaching the 2 lessons in one day, but we did it! We also modeled both of the activities well, which was evident when the students clearly understood what they had to do. I think some of our artifact bags were too easy, while some of them may have been too hard. My students guessed the correct event just by looking at the picture on the outside. We originally planned for the timeline to be up on the board while the students were looking through their bags so they could see the different options to help them pick the event on the timeline that their bag went with. My group finished about 2 minutes early and for the cooperative activity, my group finished in about 5 minutes so we had too much extra time. All of the groups seemed to finish early, so we should've moved onto the independent practice sooner. It's so great to finally say that I'm done and all of the long hours I put into working on these lesson plans had actually paid off!