In Limbo

Today was my FIRST day to teach a lesson!!! My teacher told me what she wanted me to talk about, gave me the notes that went in their interactive journals, and said here ya go! So I made the brief  (2 slides) ppt on Chemical Formulas and the Law of Conservation of Mass. She only added in one thing and said it was excellent! She gave me three suggestions after I taught the first time and that was it. I wasn't NEAR as nervous as I thought I would be. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think it's because she has no more than 15 students in any of her classes. That probably helped a lot. I said the vocab words over and over, I put the definition into words I thought they could relate to. I made connections between previous experiments and the notes. I randomly called on students to answer questions (after I saw my teacher do it). I asked them to repeat what I had said. Now let me say, this was the most important thing I stumbled upon today! So I really only got to teach for about 15 minutes max btw. Anyway, after I repeated a definition of a word in about two or three different ways, I called on a student to tell me the definition. It was incredible how many students actually started to pay attention! I will say, the deer in the headlights look freaked me out quite a bit. I wasn't sure if they weren't understanding what I was saying or if they were just zoning out. The hardest thing, and something I didn't take into consideration when I was making the lesson, was that my students hadn't grasped a previous concept. By not understanding that concept, they weren't able to fully understand the notes. If I had more time I would have gone back and reiterated that concept, but the bell rang and I ran out of time. However, it was SOO much fun!!! I wasn't nervous in front of the kids and I just did my thing. It was...exhilarating! I can't wait to do it again!!