I got the opportunity to take my first LTO teaching contract this year with an awesome grade 3&4 group earlier this year. It was definitely full-on in comparison to the daily supply work I was getting so complacent in, but I grew to love them so much over the course of the month I spent with them. I was totally stressed out and overwhelmed most days, but they were so kind and funny and bright and made me laugh so much, it made it worth it. This group of students had been without a permanent teacher since the winter break when I met them in early February, so we started with an initial conversation about what they WANTED to learn in Language and Math with me over the next few weeks. “We don’t even know division yet!” Pshhh, of course they did! They knew multiplication. Same, same… but different.
Taking on an LTO with not much communication from the last teacher is definitely tricky (especially when they hadn’t been in the class for 3 weeks before officially taking leave). The beginning lessons felt like the students were often so bored/beyond my multiplication and math facts review, trying to grasp where they were at. Finding tasks that actually challenged them and slowed them down a bit always felt like a huge win. The grade 3/4 split was also something new for me to manage, and be mindful of my expectations when instructing the whole group. Luckily most of them were math wizkids, and we got to learning about division and inverse operations pretty smoothly.
We completed this Guess Who? activity with 12 student-written math sentences answering questions describing themselves. Students were instructed to include 5 multiplication sentences, 5 division sentences, 1 addition and finally 1 subtraction sentence. In addition to the math being correct, they were also awarded marks for following these instructions.
I got to tackle my first bulletin board with this class (they still had some Christmas tree mosaic up in February!) and I got to show off my version of a little classroom TLC. The self-portraits are too cute! And the art-making was a great motivator to push them through the math task. Multiple rpunds of editing were needed with pushes to try to come up with math sentences a little more complicated than “x 1” or “÷ 1” (could’ve been a great opportunity to introduce prime numbers, now that I think back on it…) and reminders about following instructions for the operation limits (luckily we can easily swap around some of the same numbers to turn a multiplication sentence into a division sentence [and vice-versa!]), but I am certainly very proud of the final products, no pun intended.
