Day 12/13 - Culture Bags and my First Planned Lesson

Tuesday was another great day. It was a fairly ordinary day, but another wave of students brought in their culture bags or "About Me" bags. I'm absolutely amazed at the generosity of my students. They are always offering me things that I haven't tried before or things that I am not familiar with. They spent a fair bit of time asking me about traditional Australian foods and whether or not I've tried them. They promised that they would bring things in the following day so I could "have a go" at some new things. After the day was over I attended the first staff meeting of the year with my host teacher. I know that it's a cause of stress and sometimes it feels a bit monotonous for experienced teachers but my goal here was to become a sponge and just soak in all of the experiences as best as I could. The staff meeting was basically 2 condensed versions of professional development seminars. The first was on behavior management and the second was about inclusive education. They were both interesting and would have been extremely valuable as professional development sessions if it weren't for the abbreviated time periods.

Wednesday was the first day I had a lesson to implement that I completely planned on my own. It was also the day of my feast because there were about 6 students that brought in different things for me to try! Before I was meant to plan my lesson my cooperating teacher gave me the Learning Essentials (Learning Standards in NY Education-speak) that I was supposed to cover. It was a lesson about chance and data which is a large part of their QCAT which is the state test in Queensland. These tests are "low-stakes" in that they aren't published. The results are on the students report cards and are used internally while assessing the students. The lesson familiarized students with proper probability terminology (impossible, certain, equally likely, more likely, and less likely) and the statistics of a deck of cards (number of cards, suits, and colors). The lesson was largely successful from my point of view given that it was my first lesson.