5th-6th Montessori

It’s very challenging to correct math pages and give them back to students, work with students who aren’t “getting it” and still keep an eye on everyone in the room and keep after them all to be quiet. Felt like quite an intense workout, but I felt good about helping them understand how to add and subtract their mixed fractions – even if, apparently, I was showing them a “different” way to do it than their teacher had demonstrated.

The problem with supervising the Montessori system is that the kids have a packet of materials to finish by the end of the week – one for math and one for language arts, usually. Unfortunately, they look at me with those big, innocent eyes and tell me that they have finished everything, and there is no way for me to verify this since I’m not their teacher and don’t know exactly what should be done. So, the teacher was doing testing down the hall and she checked in a couple of times and was NOT happy that kids were telling me this and she really got on their cases about it.

Best moment was: after having to remove a disruptive student from the classroom – after viewing his anger at me – I ended  up tutoring him with his math page and we got along just fine – once I identified the error he was making, he readily went thru and corrected all of his other problems.