Students analyze an image and the teacher asks "how many do you see?" Students write stories or draw pictures based on what they count. Differentiated instruction emphasized. This lesson was taught in Spanish for a Dual-Language Immersion classroom.

This class was almost always entirely taught in Spanish even though this was a Dual Language Immersion class. After discussing the lesson with my master teacher it was concluded that I teach this lesson entirely in Spanish. This was an activity from the Bay Area Math Project, however it was in English and incomplete! I altered the worksheet and cropped the important image to hand out to the students. This worksheet had something that caught my attention- a self-assessment chart on an arc with the numbers 1-4 on it and “self-assessment” written underneath. I was impressed by the metacognitive aspect, however, I could not implement it because I did not have the original rubric.

For the direct instruction, I modeled the steps using a bunch of flowers (in order to grasp their attention). Many students were actively engaged with my instruction, asking questions like, “could you count the flowers now?” Some advanced students would give complex examples such as, “if you have eleven flowers and you take away three, you have nine flowers left.” This surprised me, as I never asked for any kind of calculations during this lesson, only counting.

When they moved to their table to work on their sentences, I was busy scanning and hovering over the students. I was looking for them to be sitting, counting, talking amongst themselves, coloring, writing, and using the manipulatives. They were all mostly doing this. Those students who I saw needed help were given one-to-one individual instruction. I would ask everyone how he or she was doing then commend him or her for doing anything they were supposed to be doing, no matter how bad they were doing something else. This could be anything from, “I like the way you are writing complex sentences" to “good job coloring in all the balloons”. For the latter remark I would follow up with “so how many ballons are there?”, to which they would start to count of until they said “Seven!”, which was the total amount of balloons. If they had any trouble with the non-linear approach of the image I provided each table with a set of manipulatives so they could line up the amount of items they were counting. I helped about one person per table, five students total. I would stay with that student for about 2-3 minutes explaining, motivating and pushing the assignment. I only had 13 minutes total to work with the students on the tables.

I was sick at that time so I felt like I did not do a good job. Both my master teacher and site supervisor commended me for doing a great job, which made me feel better emotionally and physically.

Example of Student Work: