My First Solo Class

I taught my first class on Friday. It felt like pure chaos. The students were all excited to be there, and wanted to get straight to work. I started the class by having them open up the webpage I made for the class and showing them the page and what was on it. I showed them where the tutorials are and where the log on information was available. Once I finished that I asked them to open up Scratch and log on and that’s when I felt the chaos started.

Some students followed the instructions to log on without issue others appeared to have not been listening to the instructions and needed help logging onto scratch. While helping those students the ones already logged on started to play around and just wanted to know how to do varies things or how to start. Sadly the next part was showing the different elements of the programs and how to create an animation. I didn’t make it to how to make an animation because they stopped listening and just wanted to play with the program.

I shifted gears and allowed them to play with the different kinds of blocks and sprites. If they had questions or wanted to know how to make a certain program work a certain way they could ask. I spent most of the period running back and forth answer questions and showing cool little things to different students. One interesting thing that I did was answer questions in different order that way a student with question on one side would have to wait or ask the person next to them. The students were very much into helping one another make cool animations.

There are a few different things I have been instructed I need to work on for next class. I need to keep their focus when giving instructions to the students. The way I am going to try and fix this is by having the students log on to scratch and then turn their monitors off while I give instructions about what we are doing in class today. The next part I needed to work on was reflective time. The students had a good time and had a lot of fun and learned a good deal of how the program works but that doesn’t mean it is going to stick. I need to take 5 to 10 minutes at the end of class to talk to the students and ask them questions about what they liked or how they did something a certain way or what they need help in understanding. It’s a quick little question to help gauge where each student is at in their work.

I am going to add those two elements to the next lesson and hopefully it will improve the classroom and the learning experience of the students. Once I add those two things are added I’m hoping new areas of weakness appear so I can better myself.