Sub Day... Take 2!

So I woke up this morning and started getting ready when I got a text message from my mentor teacher "Hey, I'm not feeling too well so I'm taking a sick day. Would you like me to write sub plans for you or the sub?" (As I am not an official substitute I am not allowed to be there with the kids without a paid sub in the room) I decided that I would give it a try and so the sub plans were sent to me. The day started off well enough but due to unforeseen difficulties (Our class in charge of lunch workers) there was quite a bit of confusion during the late morning time... I finally gave up and we moved on to bigger and better (or just more educational) things. I started teaching my capacity math lesson. It went well. The students were able to figure out the conversions and when they struggled they were able to talk to their neighbor to figure it out. One of my biggest struggles with Math in the school is how much the students need to understand. I would love it if they could figure out why the formulas work or even ask specific questions to help them understand. But that is not the way the students learn math so trying to change their ideas in less than a month is extremely difficult!
Later on in the day I met with my guided reading group. We are getting to a great part of the book so it was interesting to see what they think about the book so far and to see how they are connecting the ideas in the book.  After guided reading we did Art. We talked about Georgia O'Keefe and then imitated one of her paintings using watercolors. It was a lot of fun and the students put a lot of work into it. After Art we talked about Haiku's and created a few traditional Haiku's. After Writing the students split up and went to reteach sections for math. The group I got seemed to understand the straight conversions but struggled with story problems that had multiple steps. It was hard for them to break things down in order to solve the equations.

... And that was my second sub day. It was crazy at times. Let's just hope that I have more control over the class when they are my own class (I'm sure that will be the case but who knows!).

**A little bit of humor but there is some bad language... Just a warning**