Planning For Instruction (Prompt 2)

One great way of giving the students control and still promote learning is to just allow students to divide up into different sections and teach different parts of a lesson.  For example if you were studying about different geometric shapes.  Give each group a different shape such as one group gets rhombus and another one will get rectangle.  This will give the students some control in order to teach the other students and the teacher can always add or clarify any mistakes the students make.

            Everything seemed to be controlled by teacher except for calendar time.  The teacher made all the students do this by whoever was in charge of the calendar that week.  She also gave different students different jobs for the week.  This allows the students to have some responsibility over a small job that does not have any consequences if not done perfect.

            It is really hard to give a lot of independence to first graders, so the teacher has to help motivate the students herself because they have not fully learned self-sufficiency because they are son young.  However by giving them jobs it allows them to learn that they need to be self-motivated in order for them to want to do their jobs to the best they can.