The First Teaching Lesson!

I had the first lesson where the kids were actually able to take something away from the lesson in terms of knowledge yesterday. It seemed to go okay but I didn't feel like everyone understood exactly what the point was. I am hoping that in the later maths lessons this week a lot of that will be explained. I guess as I only had one third of the class I will be able to see if it was just that group of kids and that I just had a bit of bad luck or whether it is the style of teaching and the structure of the map I built. If after next week's group I have the same problem I will look at changing the map and the way I teach the children about it.

As you can see everyone had the same original pattern and the goal of the first section was to recognise and repeat the pattern. Some got right into it and others took a while to get used to the controls again. At the end of the 45 minute lesson some people still had nothing while others had either done it correctly and gone onto the next area or then had something but it wasn't correct so they weren't allowed to progress like here:

This was taken about 5 minutes before the lesson was due to end. As you can see a few had got it correct while others either had something incorrect or barely anything at all. The two strips at the far end had no one in them which is why they are fully empty but they rest were being worked on. 

In the second area (with the white blocks) the students had to look at  the shape in front of them and based on perspective think how many blocks were used to build the shape in front of them. They were all made differently so that they wouldn't be able to copy answers and everyone's had a different number - between 5 and 10 blocks - to complete the shape. Then in the final area there is a house. In front of each side of the house there are signs saying :

• View 1
• View 2
• View 3
• View 4

On a piece of paper that we gave them, they had to colour in squares to show what each side of the house looked like. Each side had a different pattern of wood and windows so each drawing should have been different.

Sadly the outside area (although one student was close) was untouched and therefore the chest of axes was unused, leading to the chest becoming very sad! I hope it gets used next lesson!