My first official act as program coordinator was to reassign myself from little people to middle school and then go out and hire a top-notch little people teacher. I was very excited to be back in the land of medium to big people and free of many of the care-taking duties. Of course I still get some of the same questions (no joke, I've had 7th and 8th graders ask me to tie their shoes for them) but the answers have changed; rather than helping the child to complete the task I usually remind them that they are not in kindergarten anymore and send them off to "figure it out" for themselves (I think this is the real reason so many teens walk around with untied shoelaces--they never learned how to tie them and no one will do it for them at this late stage of life.). One question that drives me absolutely batty though is "Miss, what time is it?" or the response of "I was just checking the time!" when I tell them to put the phone away. The fact that there is a huge clock on the wall is not a good reason to leave their phone in their pocket because they cannot read an analog clock and see no point in learning how. Some teachers deal with this by putting a digital clock in their classrooms. I am not so kind, I believe children should learn to read an analog clock and I plan to, under the guise of vocabulary instruction, teach mine how to do so this year (of course right after I decided this the district announced new clocks are going in every classroom and they are digital but it still doesn't change the fact that students need this skill).
Since this year most of my students will be self-contained with me we are going back to my elementary roots as far as scheduling and classroom procedures go. I'm also trying to do as much cross-curricular work as possible so students work with the same vocabulary set in as many situations as possible (remember it takes meeting a word at least 10 times in meaningful context to really learn it). Our unit on time will be no exception. We'll have the normal clock vocabulary work, counting by 5's, 15's and 30's, and of course we'll get into elapsed time (because I need another reason to bang my head against the wall) but I've included a couple of cross-curricular activities as well.
The first connects to our geometry math unit and is called Angle Time. In that unit we're learning the types of angles and how to use a protractor. I developed a set of task cards that allows the students to practice all of these skills at the same time. The students take each card, record the time shown on the clock, the type of angle formed my the clock's hands and then use a protractor to measure the angle. Everything gets recorded on a single answer sheet that I can check later. What I've learned is that 1. it is best to have more sets of cards than normal when doing this as a full class activity because students take much longer working on each task and 2. this makes a great center activity that students can work on during their "free" time. |
The second cross-curricular activity connects to our social studies geography unit and is called What Time Is It In ? ? Remember way back in fourth or fifth grade when you had to memorize all fifty states and capitals? Or back in seventh or eighth grade when you had to memorize the location and capital of the countries of the world? Well we're doing the same basic unit but I'm not convinced of the necessity to actually memorize all of this information. I do however want students to be familiar with it so when someone mentions Texas they aren't searching for in on the map around Maine somewhere. In social studies we're going to do a lot of map work and other geography learning but I wanted to reinforce these skills in our English time as well and I thought what better way to do that then add a time zone section to our telling time unit. Thus the newest activity was born. To play the game each pair of students gets a time zone map (either USA or world), a set of place cards and time cards (or a cd spinner with clocks on it). The first person draws one place card and one time card and then says, "If it is (time off card) in Michigan, it will be (time) in (place off card)." If correct the student keeps the place card as a point and puts the time card back in the bag. If incorrect both cards are returned to their bags. The student with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner. We play using Eastern Standard Time as our starting point, but the file contains USA maps for each of the four major time zones as the starting point for use in other states. |