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Today I learned that you have to practice oral lessons a lot more than math lessons.  Yesterday evening (8-10:30 PM), I whispered to invisible students about how to multiply by powers of ten, and how to make 4 squared and 4 cubed.  Quite simple, really, I’m sure my students grasped it.  I used a long chain made up of 16 links with 4 little yellow glass beads on each ( like @@@@ - @@@@ - @@@@ -@@@@ -  -> to 16).  You coil up the first four sets of four  to make a square: ( I just battled with the formatting, and I don’t know enough HTML to make it work out right).

ANYWAY, it’s all pretty self-explanatory in math.  Tonight three of us (Amy, Sandra, and I) did history, starting with an explanation of the break-down of months (Did you know that a trimester is a quarter of a year?  Mester means month, and three months is a quarter of a year.  Go figure).  It was supervised practice, which means my fifteen classmates and I practice giving presentations to one another while our instructors wander around observing, making notes, and helping straighten us out.  I discovered that my instinct to fly by the seat of my pants does NOT work when giving complicated presentations: I combined two lessons, got embroiled in little red plastic cut-outs of fractions, kept getting the month-boards backwards, and finally had to be rescued by one of the instructors.

  Then we spent a solid hour on teaching how to read an analogue clock - this time Sandra was presenting.

  The guy who first presented the lesson (Mark) pointed out that and analogue clock is very confusing: like having the speedometer, the odometer, and the gas gage all on one circle.  So we had to break it down, being careful to introduce every separate part and term, and not to spring ahead and use terminology we haven’t introduced.  

Bif, who was observing our group (and who witnessed my muddle) was really helpful and insightful.  He’s reputedly a bit of a superstar in developing and expanding Montessori lessons and materials, and we’ve only had one quick lesson from him, which was today, so I was a little intimidated.  But he was really clear while playful, saying things like, “My alarm clock goes of when the hour hand (the Namer) is at the seven, and the minute hand (the Counter) hasn’t started counting out the minutes yet.  But the counter starts ticking along - 5, 10, 12 - minutes past the hour, and I still haven’t gotten out of bed yet! ”  All of this done while moving the hands on a large wooden clock. Whew!

  I’m eager to become a better story teller.

  This past weekend I went into NYC, toured the shops at the Rockefeller Plaza; sat on a windowsill in an (air-conditioned!) Barnes and Noble to read the end of Jane Austen’s Emma; walked through a street market where there was a stand with great mounds of watermelon, pineapple, strawberries, kiwis, and bananas to make you a smoothie before your eyes ….

… and got some New York pizza!  It was good: thin, plenty of cheese and tomato sauce, slipped into the oven when I came in to melt the cheese and make the bottom of the floppy crust crispy.  In the meantime I chatted with the two guys behind the counter.  Then I rushed down 59th street past the crazy man yelling on the street corner to Park Ave where I was going to church, eating a very delicious, floppy slice of pizza, chuckling at the spectacle I was making and managing not to get anything on my white shirt.

Tomorrow some of the other students and I are going to watch Harry Potter in the movie theater here in New Rochelle, and on Saturday I’m going to go into the city with a group to the Museum of Natural History.

And now I’m going back to the classroom to practice some more history.  And I’ll take it slow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 8:19 pm by Claire and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.