Today was my first day teaching a lesson for this practicum and although there were a lot of things that happened today, I want to discuss mainly my experience teaching and highlight only a few noteworthy points from the rest of the day.
I began the lesson fairly confident with my lesson plan and what I was going to do with the students. I began by asking the students a couple questions about music and what their favorite types of music are since we are doing a project related to jazz. The students were incredibly excited, which made me even more so. I began reading Ben's Trumpet, by Rachel Isadora. The students were very interested in the book, and I paused a couple of times to point of some things or ask questions like, "Is Ben holding a trumpet?" and we discussed how the trumpet was imaginary in order to foreshadow what we were going to be doing the rest of the day. Next I pulled up an image search of various musical instruments on the board. I asked the students to raise their hands I called on various students to come up to the Mimeo (which is very similar to a Smartboard) and they got to click on an instrument with the Mimeo pointer and tell the class what it was. The students began to get squirmy and restless, however I still needed to go over my demo for their worksheet they were going to be doing in class. In hindsight, I believe I could have shortened everything up a little bit or cut out one of the portions of my lesson. I think all portions were important, but they were very ready for their assignment and were actually very competent with the very short demo I gave. I handed out a worksheet with musicians that were holding their hands as if they had instruments in them and the students got to pick which instrument from another handout I gave them goes where. I was a little nervous that the students would not understand the concept entirely, however the were amazingly creative and ingenious with the worksheet! I struggled keeping the classroom down to a medium level of noise. My cooperating teacher told me that overall the lesson went well and a little bit of the noise and goofiness of the students was due to having a new teacher in front of them who did not know their names so they could test their boundaries. I used a clapping pattern for the students to repeat and to get their attention when I needed to, which always worked long enough for me to tell them the next instructions, but the noise level still escalated afterwards. I was planning on playing some jazz music throughout their work time, but to keep the chaos level down I left the music off for today and will hopefully be able to use it tomorrow.
On a lighter note I was not expecting to have this "first" today: I made my first student cry. I have always been scared for this day to come in the past, however I am okay with how this incident played out. One of the first graders was running around the classroom with a piece of leftover scratch paper that he cut out and rolled up and was running around the room with his "paper axe." I took it away from him, asked him to take his seat, and then threw the scrap in the garbage. The student returned to his seat but not without a small tantrum and a couple tears.
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