Valentines Day Lesson

The second lesson I taught in my first placement classroom was a math related lesson but my goal was to provide students with specific learning objectives before each lesson, providing feedback on the processes and strategies students use, and giving student’s time to consider how to approach a task. These simple strategies alone, help students promote metacognition.

My lesson plan was presented during the week of Valentine’s Day so I provided Valentine’s Day M&M’s for the students to eventually create a bar graph with. I wanted to actively engage my students so that it required students to use multiple learning skills and higher-order thinking to construct meaning and knowledge.

I modeled different cooperative learning strategies for students to use on their independent practice when it came to counting numbers and recording them on a graph. I grouped students heterogeneously and eliminated competition among groups.

I also modeled higher order thinking strategies to students so that they could use information to solve, analyze, and make predictions.

Overall, I feel that the lesson went really well and students benefited from learning how to work with each other and how to use instructional practices for metacognition. (REC 6.7)