Week 6 CES

This week I have been preparing for my full-time teaching.  I think that having more time by myself in the classroom has helped me make spur of the moment decisions on how to do things.  I have learned that things can come up and might alter the lesson I have planned.  Also, I have thought of better ways to do activities that I did not think about while I was planning.  These decisions have shown me the importance of being flexible in the classroom.  On a couple of days, I felt like schedule changes threw me for a loop.  Now, I feel like I am getting better with going with the flow and making last minute decisions if needed.  I have also noticed the importance of reflection.  I think I need to sit down after each day and write the things that worked and did not work from my lessons.  I want to think about how I could do activities differently where I will be better prepared the next time.  This week I noticed that the dry erase markers worked better than the base ten blocks for the place value mats.  When we used blocks, I had at least one person start building with them each day.  I did not have any problems with the markers.  They all liked writing the numbers in the boxes to solve.