Today I had the opportunity to co teach with one of my collegues. This turned out to be a rewarding experience. Today we taught the students about Africa. we played african type music while the sts. did a warm up asking them a basic question about africa. then my collegue did a brief lecture on the african continient. we then broke the students in to five groups each one representing a part of africa(north, east, south, west, and central africa) each group had a different activity for the students to complete. these activites we intended to engage and keep them engage in learning about africa. at the end we elaborated on the warm asking them what new and interesting information they learned about africa.
I thought that this lesson went well. the information given on central africa seemed to be something that the kids were able to do with ease. but the activity for west africa was a bit to complicated for the alloted time we had. I think i should have pick which african countries to look and no more than 7 and then have them answer a question on it, i think they would have walked away with a better understanding of that concept of GDP. i also say the many varieties of teaching strategies which we have learned through out the semester. the board game, getting information from text, crossword puzzle, application activities, etc. were all incorporated in this lesson today. i do see that these work well when combined.
Reflecting on the events of today, i must admit it went much better than i had anticipated. My collegue and i worked well together and we do in fact compliment one another. i do know that there are many things that i would change about the way it went. and that is lesson some of the activities. Also if i had more time i would have modeled much better instead of having to explain the activities fuller during the learning time. I would not teach all these at the same time i would only do two at a time because these worked well but might have been more enjoyable if it was smaller information given with adequete time. I think lack of good modeling was the biggest down fall, but overall this was the best teaching experience i have had all semester long, on top of the fact that the cooperating teacher is awesome.
