Too much time/not enough time

Today I led another shared reading activity. It was a lesson focusing on character traits from the story that we had read yesterday. I walked the class through identifying a character trait for one of the characters and then finding examples from the text to support that trait. Then they had to do the same thing for a different character from the story. While they were working on their own, my CM suggested that I have them turn in their notes into a paragraph, since it is one of the things that they are tested on on the PSSA's. We had enough time, so I then led them through writing a paragraph about a character trait using their examples to support. It surprised me how quickly they finished with both of these tasks. It also made me realize the importance of having a back-up plan, especially since the art teacher was almost 10 min late coming to the class.

On a similar note, the math lesson that I led actually took much longer than expected. I taught the math lesson where the class constructed a 10,000 chart to display in the room. I had a feeling that this task would take a long time, but was not expecting it to go almost 2 hours! Luckily my CM was understanding and let us continue to work on it and finish it to completion. The students loved seeing the final chart hung up on the wall since it took them so long to finish making it. It was a great accomplishment.