Lesson Plan Critique

This past week I was able to teach my first lesson in my second grade mathematics class. I modified a lesson reviewing money concepts up to a dollar. The lesson I used can be found at the following site under technology lesson plan. http://kadams.wikispaces.com/

Before I began my lesson I was afraid the students would have difficulty using the laptops because they had not been exposed to laptops previously.  Furthermore, technology is not frequently incorporated into my practicum classroom so I was unsure how the students would react to having a computer in the room, i.e. they would get so excited about the computers that we would lose focus on using the computer as a tool instead of the main point of the lesson.

I chose to use a money review game online as independent group work during the lesson.  I chose this game because there were no graphics to visually distract the students and because the game was programmed to reject wrong answers.  Most of my classroom consists of students suffering from attention deficits and this game ensured those students could focus on the task of gathering coins to find a set total.

After successfully completing the lesson and seeing  the children’s excitement about learning math while playing, I realized successfully using technology during a lesson requires extensive planning.  Setting up the computers before class required more time than I expected.  Every computer had to have the game already loaded and ready to go as soon as I finished the group lesson so the students could quickly begin.  Then, after the computer hibernated during the lesson I had to quickly log back in to each computer while grouping the students to begin the game. 

Set up for the lesson went extremely well and I was ready before the students came into math class.  During the lesson the students actively participated in the problem solving activity I used to start the lesson and quickly began to answer questions and correct each other when incorrect answers were given.  The students also responded very well to being asked to explain their answer as if they were the teacher telling the other students how to solve the problem.

However, as soon as I began the independent portion of the lesson using the computer game the class became very hectic.  Most of the noise was the excitement on the part of the students, but the rest was filled with questions from students who had never used a mouse pad on a laptop.  I assumed the students would know how to use a laptop by the second grade, especially after I discovered all the resources available at the school.  I was sorely mistaken.  By the time I was able to get to all the students to show them how to drag and click because they had not understood the first time,  (I had done a classroom example before and explained how to click and drag) the class was over and the students had to go to centers.

If I had to teach this lesson again I would not spend as much time on the problem solving and jump straight into the game.  The students just needed time to explore and discover on the computer instead of being expected to just jump into the assignment.  It would be even better if I could introduce the game to the class before I used it in a lesson so the students would already know how to use the technology and work the game.  Then they could get to more problems and be more successful during their play time.

Even though the lesson was quite stressful, it was 100% worth the stress and effort.  The students begged for math to continue when I told them the lesson was done and I am scheduled to go back in a week to allow the students more time to play math games during their “Friday fun.”