Reflection on the Micro-Lesson (Assignment 2)

One of the things I enjoyed was listening to my fellow students say things like "Oh..." and the way they said it tells me that there is something going on in their heads. Maybe they saw something they had never thought of before, or saw a thing they had seen before but in a different way.

On the other hand I think there were a few things that could have gone better. I think that the delivery of our lesson was not very well organized. I think that there were times when one of us talked too much and when we interrupted each other. That was because we did not plan it thoroughly before. I think that if we had taken more time to plan the lesson and divide more specifically what each one of us was going to do and say, our presentation would have gone much better.

I liked the way we got the students engaged in learning. I think that manipulatives are a great way to give students something to do. The student feel more comfortable doing math, because they can rely on a concrete image to go further in their mathematical development. The manipulatives do not intimidate the student and facilitate the transition from the concrete to the abstract. In this case it helped us go from operations with areas of rectangles to algebraic expressions. Another thing I noticed is that you, as a teacher, have to let the students play for a little while with the manipulatives once you have given them the manipulatives for the first time. If you don't let them play, they will be playing with them when you are trying to explain something. This is why I think that manipulatives take a lot more time than regular lecturing and worksheets, but in the end the benefits are more fruitful.