Today I taught my first "real" math lesson (I say real, meaning that I am the one who wrote up the plan and enacted it. I have taught math before this year in this placement just when my MT tells me what to do right before). The math topic for today was patterns. Most students had never heard of patterns before. (or at least did not articulate that they had when asked). I started by a brief discussion, asking students if they have ever heard of the word repeat before. One student raised his hand and said it was when you mock someone, which he is correct. After this student said this, noone else was able to come up with something else that repeats, even with prompting. I tried to get students to think of their daily activities (brushing teeth, getting dressed, waking up, going to bed). Those are all activities that students repeat. After we talked about the word repeat, I asked if students had ever heard of the word "pattern" before and if they had, tell me what the pattern was. A few students were able to correctly identify what a pattern was (a student example was i did my sisters hair with barrets-yellow blue yellow blue yellow blue.)

Next, I continued by reading a book about patterns. Throughout the book we talked about the different patterns that appeared, focusing on the AB patterns. After the book, we worked on coming up with rhythmic patterns and translating rhythmic patterns into concrete patterns (using halloween cut outs). I gave several students chances to try to come up with their own rhythmic pattern. Several were able to, several were not.

Next, I modeled how to create an AB pattern with the halloween cutouts and we made one together as a class. Then I set the students free to create their very own patterns. The directions of this ended up being for students to create only an AB pattern which I feel like made the task not so high level. Students were not able to go about the question in an open ended way. This was not the way I set up the lesson so I was frustrated with having to teach it this way. My MT told me that I needed to only have them do AB patterns since they havent done patterns yet. So they were only given 2 different colors of halloween cut outs to create their pattern, not giving them much room to show their understanding of patterns.

After looking at the patterns that the students created, all but 9 students successfully created an AB pattern. Some of the work that students did show that they clearly did not understand how to create a pattern, others look as if they may have known but didn't have room to continue to pattern. Therefore, it would be beneficial for me to have a chance to talk with the students (time ran out so I did not get the opportunity today but will try to do so later in the week if possible) about the pattern they created and why they did it the way they did. If they had a reason and can tell me what would go next in the patterns that they did (not necessarily AB), that would tell me that they may actually know how to create a pattern and just did not listen to the directions of creating an AB pattern.

One student did orange pumpkin, white ghost, orange pumpkin, white ghost, white ghost, white ghost. This is a student who is very low in terms of academics therefore, I expected this to be kind of challenging for her. This activity shows me that she needs more opportunities to explore AB patterns to gain a deeper knowledge of patterns.