New start to a New day

“I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.”
― Steve Maraboli

This is my second attempt at writing a blog. I have a two page draft of another blog written up and saved, but I feel it was too full of negatives about the administration for me to post in good faith. So, let's hope I get this done with more efficiency this time.

This week I tried a new activity in my regular classes, station work. It was a review lesson of all the material. We had 4 stations set out across the room, with 4 groups of students. Red group would start at station 1 and blue group at station 2, etc... After 5 minutes the groups would switch to the next station.
At each station the student would use a different set of skills. In station 1 it was spelling. How do you spell math? (prompt written in Korean), with key vocabulary used in spelling. The second station was to use pictures to make three sentences. The pictures were all about key expressions or words from the lesson. The third was a sentence ordering game, the students would look at the scrambled sentences and rearrange them in the correct order. Station four was a create your own sentence station. There were no pictures, just three questions that the students had to answer in their notebooks.

All but 2 or 3 students per class completed this activity. I was very happy with how much the students worked together at each station. As I walked around the room I overhead student's spelling difficult words for each other and identifying words for the picture cards. All of the students were eager to do the activity too! Some students who don't usually respond during normal text book time were very engaged with the hands on parts of this activity.
They loved touching the picture cards and moving them around to make a sentence. They would move some of the cards around, open their book to check and then move some more cards around until they were satisfied with the sentence they made.

One thing I have to change is how I set up stations. My room is in desperate need of more tables. Over the years, through use and movement, we have lost over 5 tables. So there is barely enough tables to seat every child. I will need to contact the music room or the computer room to get extra tables and chairs if I want to do a station lesson again.
The students were very flexible about not having a chair to sit at for some of the stations, but I saw some of them were uncomfortable with not having a place to sit down and do the work.

 Another problem I had was the explanation of directions. It was very difficult explaining the concept to the students of having each group start in different places and move every 5 minutes to the next place. It took about 8-10 minutes to fully explain it. If I do this lesson again I think the students will have a easier time understanding the concept, but it was just so difficult this week and I felt really lost when explaining.

My co-teacher seemed very happy about this too. She requested some more materials that would be similar to this lesson. I am hoping to get approved for more of these types of lessons in the future.  That is a huge barrier that is hopefully over come.