Lesson 1

Today we started with a get-to-know-you game called "Jump in, jump out"

Jump in, Jump Out

turn yourself around

I said Jump in, jump out

Introduce yourself!

My name is so and so

(class says "Yeah!")

And I like blank

(yeah!)

And I can blank

(yeah!)

Alright,Alright, alright

When the person introducing themselves said what they can do, they made a gesture to help everyone remember. Then when the class said "alright, alright, alright" everyone did that gesture 3 times in rhythm.

We had the whole class introduce themselves which was fun but a little longer than I expected. Many of them needed a little coaxing introducing themselves and picking a gesture simply because they felt kind of shy. This pushed their comfort zone a little bit, but the kids had fun. They certainly got a lot of wiggles out. Fun fact: A lot of the students said they like cake, pizza, and dogs.

It's a good thing that we went over my attention signals at the beginning like my mentor Emily Soderborg suggested. We practiced that when I said "Shark Bait!" they said "Ohh ha ha!" Another attention signal was when I just started to touch my head, elbows, knees, toes, and what not until they were all quietly copying what I was doing. These came in handy to keep everyone organized and learning.

Next we did "The Division Game." I taught them the melody for these words

The whole group is the dividend

The divisor's how we divide

The Quotient is the answer

The Remainder's what's left aside

The whole class is the dividend

but someone has to choose

The divisor number meaning

how many people per group

(or "how many groups"  *measurement division vs partitive)

We sat in a circle and sang the song while we did the hand game of "down by the banks." The person whose hand was slapped on "group" picked a number between 1 and 9 and everyone quickly tried to make a group of that number. I was in charge of finding and gathering "the remainders."

After that we continued singing...

If the group's already full before we get a chance

It's our turn to break it down and 

do the remainder dance...

The remainder dance!

The remainder dance!

Bust a move!

The remainder dance

I had the remainder students dance with me and I encouraged students to be loud on the "bust a move!" part. My goal was to make it fun so that they didn't feel like it was sad to be the odd man out. Some kids were enthusiastic about it, others felt a little awkward. Perhaps it would be good to allow the remainders to trade out with people who feel more outgoing about dancing.

I tried to analyze the numbers after we got into our groups. I would ask them questions like "how many groups of __ do we have? How many remainders do we have? That means __ divided by __ is __ with a remainder of __!" I tried to point out to them how it was the opposite of multiplication. I would have them reverse the equation and answer what __ x__ equals.

Some students got confused when I tried to write the equation on the board. It probably would have been better to do a format somewhat like the picture below instead of the long division way. I want to get feedback from Mrs. Bruce to see how I could better bridge the gap of the game we played and explaining how to write out a division equation. Outside of the song lyrics I refrained from explaining what the dividend, divisor and quotient are. The song may help them to understand better in the future with more exposure and repetition, but it seemed that this was enough for them to chew on for now. I feel pretty confident that they all understand what a remainder is though.