First Teaching: Monday March 12th

For the first day that was packed with activities, today went exceedingly well. I had the students working in groups to complete an activity where they would examine maps on rainfall, terrain and temperature in the west to make settlement and exploring decisions. I had grouped the students according to the pretest and other general knowledge about their ability and how I have seen them work together. I wanted mixed ability groups so that the students who had a more difficult time reading maps would have students in their group to help. It was my concern that some students who felt they couldn't answer the questions and intimidated by another student would not participate. While there were four separate maps the students could be looking at, there was only one copy of each map per group. I was hoping they would all have a chance to look at the map, but I realized that some students who were more eager would take hold of the map and the less eager gradually became less involved. In addition, there were some issues of fighting and not listening in two groups. This had me seriously concerned because I was planning on using these same groups for the next couple of days. I made some rearrangements to the schedule the next day to talk about how to work in groups together and decided to allow them to choose their own groups the next day.
My partner and I uses three different characterstics (rainfall, temp and terrain) to find maps on and distribute. In the end these may have been too many maps. In the beginning on the activity we brainstormed many different characteristics but then only had three differing styles of maps. I think using just temperature and terrain would have been more manageable for the students. In addition, next time I would include at least two copies of the maps so that more students had the opportunity to view them.
Overall the students worked well to examine the maps and plot exploring paths. I was very impressed by discussions I heard and was impressed with how they followed directions. They were a complicated set of directions so I was sure to be very clear and assigned one person in each group to act as a task keeper to make sure they had completeted all the steps. This helped students to stay focused and on task and I was pleased with how it worked. The timing went very smoothy due to this as well and we had plently of time to debrief and review.
When I went home and looked at the answers though I was not entirely satisfied with the number of groups that got to this part so the next day I decided to have a 'Do Now' activity that would get at the main point from today's lesson.