CT learning activities

I severely underestimated how difficult it would be for me to create learning objectives and rationales from all of my learning activities. I really thought this would be a simple task once I had some good descriptions of my activities, but i found that it was not. Essentially, it is very hard to get exactly how you want a lesson to go out on paper, especially when you know that teaching children never really goes the way that you want it to go.

I also struggled with getting my rationale and learning objectives to connect back to exactly that category of activity I was intending to match it up to. Basically, I wish other people could just read my mind because it was hard for me to put my thoughts into words! haha

Now that I am teaching in a classroom I have started to have the mindset of like okay this is what they are supposed to walk away from this lesson having learned - but it’s really possible that they will walk away with none of it. So this is something I really keep in mind now while teaching 6th graders although I shouldn’t have let this affect my ideal rationale and learning objectives for each learning activities. This was truly a great experience though because it really pushed me out of my comfort zone to take a step back and think about what my students would be learning if ideally they walk away from any activity having grasped the entire thing. Although this may be a rare concept nowadays, this is what we have to strive and aim for regardless. Overall it is super helpful for me to now have all these awesome activities in my back pocket that I can use with my 6th graders at any point. I am glad I put so much thought into these activities, because now I know I’m able to use them in a real classroom, rather than just saying I made them for a homework assignment and will never look at them again. So in the end, i’m really happy I spent time and effort on this activity because in the end it really paid off!!