355 Field Experience: Teaching Full Lesson

It was the big day, it was finally time to teach our full volleying lesson to our 2nd/3rd and 6th grade classes. We came in prepared with a lesson plan, assessment rubric, as well as a variety of activities to have the students practice the underhand serve and the underhand forearm pass. We decided that since volleyball is a common game found being played on beaches that we would have a beach theme. For our instant activity we played lifeguard tag where the lifeguards wore sunglasses and tried to tag seagulls that were flying and squawking throughout the gym. We then broke the students up into groups and had them rotate throughout four different stations. At one of the stations I was assessing the students underhand forearm pass for post assessment purposes. At the end of the 4 group rotations we offered the students a chance at trying our end of class challenge by underhand serving it into a number of hoops across the gym before our lesson came to a close. We only assessed in the 2nd/3rd grade class because that was the class we had pre assessment results for. We could've had better time management when teaching out lesson, we seemed to either be running out of time or having extra time. In the future I think we should rehearse a little bit better just so that we aren't scrambling throughout the lesson. The students really seemed to enjoy the activities we had the students do. Our master teacher even complimented us on our "Hula Hoop Tic Tac Toe" Game. One piece of feedback our master teacher gave us that really stood out to me was that we need to make sure that all students are listening when we are giving directions and that nobody is misbehaving. We were just trying to get through the directions as fast as we could so the students didn't get antsy and I think that might've caused some confusion at the stations. Overall it was a great learning experience and great practice being in front of actual students in a legitimate classroom setting instead of just teaching to my peers in a college setting. I learned a lot from it and I think it'll influence my future teaching in the long run.