Fifth Lesson: Jeopardy & Review

And this is Jeopardy...

After recess as usual the class came back to the classroom. We arranged the board and decided to have 2 teams (we just slit the classroom into two sides-opposing teams). Instead of having the each student respond in the form of a question, we just came up with questions and they had to answer them. The main parameters were that only the person whose turn it is could answer and if they couldn’t think of the answer they had a chance to conference with their classmates and think through their answers (this was particularly helpful for ESOL, but I think it was an important addition to the game for everyone.

We gave the students a few minutes in-class to review with their teammates prior to the game; a larger part of study time was supposed to be taken for homework the night before.

In the beginning the questions and responses were going well. The class listened intently, worked with one another and we were on a roll thinking we were going to be issue free until we came to one question. One team was given the opportunity to answer in what seemed like a long period to the other team and as such this resulted in complaints and took the lesson off task. From a teacher prospective we were trying to give an ESOL student a brief period to access his thoughts, he was drawing the answer on paper and it was clear that he knew it and was in the right direction but was having difficulty expressing it. We could have done a better job at summing up the lesson, but the tension lead the lesson in another direction. As was stated from our observation we could have used the opportunity to recognize how well everyone had done overall, and reinforced the idea that the goal of the activity was to aid in review for their exam. This is good to know if other situations similar to this are encountered.

I think that our unit was a success and that our work and efforts paid off. I look forward to future classroom experiences and student teaching in the fall. I'm going to miss this class, being in and out their classroom this semester and last semester is a reasonable amount of time to have built great relationships with some of them. Luckily I have papers to return so I will still see some of them soon. I might try to stop in for a visit at least once before the year is over.