The third time is a charmer.. ok maybe not

Hello Hello everyone, well all I can say is that I am very sorry for lagging it on sharing my experience with you all. I've been meaning to write about last Fridays; the third JA lesson plan but have been procrastinating due to the many other things on my plate this semester. Since I will begin to plan the next lesson for this Friday soon, I needed to close up this one. Well I will start by stating that this lesson's topic was the most exciting for me so far. I took a California History class last year in which we covered the Gold Rush in depth, therefore I felt confident pertaining to the actual content for the day. =) Reguardless of my knowledge on the lesson, we felt it was time for a change. Victor wanted to try to do the lecture part since he too felt confident with the material, therefore I left him take the spotlight of opening up the lesson/ lecture. On the other part I was in charge explaining the game for the day. I thought it was going to be easy but I ended up finding it a bit challenging since I had a bit trouble explaining myself. At that moment I learned that over confidence is not so great as it seems, since one might find something easy and not worry or work as hard as if you knew it was going to be challenging from the begining. Yet, we did do the game and met our objective of students understanding that not all prospectors who came to California to strike it rich in the mine were mostly not successful and it also served as a review of vocabulary. I first explained the directions to playing the game, then we split the students into groups and handed the strike- it- rich cards. We gave the students about 15mins to play the game and record their results. Throughout the game we constantly provided guidence and feedback to the students. Students were for the most part into the game and seemed to have fun with the card questions. Overall some of the points that I liked about friday's lesson was the fact that we are at the halfway point of the program. Therefore, we are at a point where we can refer to prior knowledge and key terms and content learned in previous sessions and I like that. By being able to do this students are beginging to see the bigger picture and connection between the topics and concepts. For the most part I have begun to learn the students names and interact with them for a ittlw bit after class. I like the fact that they not only see me as an authority figure but also as an approachable person. =) Well lets see what happens this week, this time I expect to do my blog asap. =)