March+10,+2011

Reflection for March 10, 2011- PEMDAS

Today the students were surprised to say the least that Dear Aunt Sally came for a visit. Some were excited to shake my hand and some wanted to turn the other way and walk out. Brianna was my "great-great-great-great-grand niece" and the kids found that quite amusing. She asked if they knew who I was and of course they said no. I introduced myself as a really old lady from Florida. Brianna had the letters that belonged to the PEMDAS acronym and wrote "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" next to them. I promptly sneezed really loudly and said "Please excuse me! I am sorry darlings." They got the idea. We then worked through some problems on the board to which the students were happy to help us at the board. Then we broke them into pairs and they worked on two problems from the worksheet we provided. We did one of their problems on the board together and "played dumb" so that they had to tell us exactly what to do. This worked out in our favor because it can totally be a precursor to next week when we teach them the scientific method because they will have to work on being specific. A couple of the students were having trouble staying on task because they were excited at the sight of me and I was being super silly with them so the slight "off-task-ness" was not a major problem. I think the part of this lesson that could be improved was the pair work time. Some were slower than others and needed more time and we should have prepared something for that. I think the best part of this lesson is that none of these kids will ever forget Dear Aunt Sally. My 7th grade teacher was Dear Aunt Sally for a day and I still remember it to this day like it was yesterday.