Win some, Lose some

It amazes me how each of my classes has such a wide variety of skills and abilities. The tricky part has been adapting my lessons to meet the wide variety of needs especially with the oh so exciting topic of keyboarding. My activity this week was a flop for the most part. It was too frustrating for the majority of my students. I found myself frustrated as I tried to come up with new ideas to make it an easier concept and now it is back to the drawing board as I try to develop a computer program in the next 4 days that will engage my students while providing a chance for them to develop their keyboarding skills.

I would like to have an intensive focus for the beginning of the year on developing keyboarding and mouse skills so that we all have the right foundation for all these ideas I have racing around in my head. I have been pouring over the state standards as well as the National Education Technology Standards and I think I finally have a timeline/curriculum hammered out for the year, now all I have to do is try and get the lesson plans formally typed up and printed as well as all of my materials together.

I was uplifted when I was leaving on Friday, one of the 4th grade teachers commented that she thought it was great that I was trying to teach the students how to type and to see that we were actually doing activities based on standards. It made me feel like I am headed in the right direction and I just have to refine my efforts a bit more. Don't get me wrong I did have classes and groups of students that enjoyed the lesson and were doing really well, but it still gets me down when even just a few have a hard time or are not interested. I encourage my students to provide constructive feedback and I have received numerous suggestions on ways to make my activities more interesting. I wish I had more time with each class, they end so quickly and I feel like we always have so much more to do. It was very uplifting to hear students call my name so I could see that they passed the required level and were moving on to the next stage. I think I will save this activity for an assessment rather than a teaching resource. I have a great deal of work ahead of me to turn it around into a successful set of lessons for next week.