My First Class

I just finished up leading my first class through a round of book speed dating.  The 7th graders are starting a series of projects in their English classes and they each need to find at least 2 award winning books to read.  After watching my teaching supervisor lead classes through twice, I tried it out myself.  I led the last class of the day, who are apparently a little on the chatty/inattentive side, so it could have gone a bit better, but I still learned a bit.
 
Lesson goals:

• Students should understand some of the different ways of assessing books.
• Students should be able to articluate what they like or don't like about a book.
• Students should be able to identify 1 or 2 books that they think they might like to check out for their projects.

Lesson plan:

• Introduce students to the idea of book speed dating.
• Talk about the different ways to assess a book: cover, reviews, friends, smell, first couple of pages, synopsis, author, etc.
• Explain how to fill out the book speed dating form.
• Students rotate through 6 different tables each with 8 books.
• Students spend 2 minutes looking at a book at their table and 1 minute assessing it on their worksheet.
• At the end of the session, each student should have one "dream date" from the tables, or may browse through the stacks of additional award winning books.

My observations from my supervisor's presentations:

• Lead with something catchy - since we were doing book speed dating, my supervisor asked everyone whether they were allowed to date.
• Engage students through questions.  My supervisor asked students how they decided if they liked a book or not.  There were lots of good answers for this one.
• Add a multi-media element.  This came in the form of a "Love Potion Number 9" Youtube video.  The kids weren't so jazzed about this one, even after I invited them to stand up and dance if they wanted to.  I might have chosen a different video, but I like that one was included!

 My thoughts from my own presentation:

• Explain things in a couple of different ways.  I rushed my explanation and got a lot of blank looks, raised hands, and general confusion.  It may have just been the group I was working with, but I think over explaining would work better than under explaining.
• Assign seats in advance.  The classroom teacher mentioned to me that with this group, she probably should have split them up into groups ahead of time to avoid some of the issues we had with kids being too chatty and unfocused.
• Keep track of time better.  I was supposed to allow 2 minutes to look at books and then 1 minute to write about the book.  But I got distracted and that didn't really happen.

Fortunately I'll be presenting this same game to 4 different classes on Monday, so I'll be able to work out the kinks and hopefully give a really good presentation!