Round 2!

Today I had the second third of the class to teach and I must say, after some changes that I made, this group was amazing! Last week, we had an all boys group and they were very excited because they were playing a popular game that some of them play at home. Also, last week they could see each other, which for a few caused a bit of a distraction. This week we had an all girls group and they concentrated really well, understood what they were doing and were silent (which for first graders is awesome)! In addition, this week I made some structural modifications.

As you can see, I added walls around the whole arena so that the students couldn't see each other and were, therefore, not distracted by their friends. Also, under certain strips of blocks, I added 'Build Disallow' blocks so they couldn't place or break blocks in places they weren't supposed to, which is something that happened a lot last week (mostly accidentally).

In terms of how well prepared I was, I logged each child onto the server before the lesson, put them in their individual strips and then gave them all the blocks they would need in advance. This actually saved between 10-15 minutes at the beginning of the lesson because of how long it takes them to log on and so on.

The only thing that probably didn't go as well as planned was the final area with the house in. I don't think anyone fully understood that one block in the game (on the house) was the same as one square on the worksheet they had in front of them. Then, we gave each student three different colours - brown for the wood, silver for the windows and yellow/orange for the door - just as we did last week but the students didn't seem to see where each kind of different block was in relation to the others. I think more work needs to be done on the perspective side of this unit (Pattern & Perspective).

 

The students about to get started!

What the arena looked like around the end of the lesson.

On the fun side, I found an NPC village just outside of where the arena was built so I decided to move the fun area out to that. I just planted a few trees around it and replaced the chest of axes and put it there. Sadly, no one got there this week either as many got stuck on the final exercise. Hopefully 'Mr. Axe Chest' will get more attention in future...