Planning Instruction (TPE 4) 

In preparation for my CalTPA lesson, I talked with my cooperating teacher about how much students have interacted with decimals so far this year. The Illustrative Math (IM) curriculum was structured in a way that assumed students had some prior knowledge from fourth grade. However, after my first lesson, it was evident students were going to need additional instruction and explanation. The Illustrative Math curriculum did not offer enough opportunities for explicit instruction. Therefore, a lot of what I taught this unit stemmed from worksheets I created or found so that I could give students the explicit instruction they needed to grasp the concept of decimals and mostly used the problems in their workbooks as independent practice. In our PLCs, we have discussed IM curriculum a lot; mostly because it doesn't provide a chance for students to be given clear instruction from the teacher. We recognize that our students need more teacher guided instruction and have made more math anchor charts or printed more math worksheets separate from their workbook activities (TPE 4.1). 

Being a part of a professional leadership community has been especially helpful in planning lessons because if Mr. Mederos (the other fifth grade teacher) is a lesson ahead, he will walk over and offer suggestions about how the lesson went, how he would have adjusted it, or what resources he used that were helpful. As he began the new science unit on consumers and producers he walked me next door to his classroom and began showing me the food webs his students made that day. He share with me what worked from the FOSS textbook and how he found a different article that was more helpful for students to read so that I could modify the lesson in a similar way for my own students (TPE 4.6).

Even though my students are fifth graders who like to act older than they truly are, they all have a playful side. During one of my Wit and Wisdom lessons, I brought in a bouncy ball that students could toss to one another in order to answer the questions I was asking. I made sure students knew they were only to throw the ball to someone who had an answer. This was a good activity because they were all so focused on the questions and the passages so they could hold the bouncy ball. I also recognize that many of my students are competitive so to appeal to their competitive side, I include white board activities so each table group competes with one another. During a math unit on adding and subtracting fractions, I created a Jeopardy quiz to review for their unit checkpoint. Each table group wanted to answer the harder questions worth 500 points in order to win (TPE 4.2). 

There have been multiple opportunities for interconnectedness between curriculum but one example that stands out to me the most was when students were comparing and contrasting substances in science. They were looking at different beakers and flasks with liquids inside them. They were given sentence frames such as: 'both of the ... containers ... but, one ... and the other....' and transitions words like however. Learning this was in perfect timing with our Wit and Wisdom lesson that that asked them to compare a character --Milo -- at the beginning of the book versus the end of the story. (TPE 4.3)