Practicum 2
My second practicum was in full day kindergarten class in London, Ontario. After the first week, I was teaching 100% of the day. One of my highlights was when my associate teacher suggested I teach the class using Rekenreks (Number Rack). The students had no prior knowledge to this math manipulative, and my lessons needed to be broken down into small, ten-minute number talks, a ten-lesson unit. Near the end of the unit, I performed one-on-one assessments with the students to see where the class was in their knowledge and understanding after my mathematics unit.
After this placement, I was able to bring this developed unit back to the Faculty of Education to use for a mathematics assessment project where I had to write detailed overviews of particular student’s achievements.
Practicum 1
My first practicum was a grade 6. I was tasked with teaching a unit on decimals. In order to make math fun and engaging I came up with various class-based math games. I knew I needed to do a lesson on ordering decimals by the thousandths. For 3 days leading up to this lesson I gave the students a handout I made in excel that had their “secret agent code number” on it. The number would slightly increase every day. It was a representation of their age in decimal form. On the lesson day the whole class had to line up and walk to the fountain and back in proper order. If they accomplished this and their code numbers were in order, they opened up the candy cane vault. This was effective because it made the class think of why the numbers were increasing, what the relationship of decimals to age was, and to show how one can increase precision when increasing decimals.
