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=My First (of many) Reflections =

First of all I just wanted to say WOW! What a great class. All this Math and energy in one room :) This year is going to be a lot of fun. Today we learned a lot of great strategies. Something Robin really stressed about today was how important reflection is. As hard as it is sometimes (and as repetitive as it seems) it is very beneficial to students, and student learning. I believe that teachers definitely need to integrate this into their lesson plans. Having a reflection seems to help store information better. I can't even count how many times I've crammed for a test and then forgot all the material the next day (University exam life anyone?). Even more importantly though, teachers need to reflect on their own work, so that they can change their plan for next year.

 Another great activity, that I believe should be integrated into every class, is bell work! Not only is it efficient for the teacher, and keeps the students organized, but it's teaching the students so many valuable skills that most of them wont get from a normal class. It teaches the students how to work independently, how to be organized, how to collaborate with their peers, and how to work well in routine. I look forward to using this activity in my future classroom!

 Last but not least I wanted to talk about how much I LOVE our assignment for this course. I feel like a lot of the assignments will maybe help us understand something a little better, but I wouldn't necessarily pull it out in 5 years. Creating a Lesson plan, and then posting it on the class Wiki is a great way to start off our teaching careers, and it's a great start to learning how to collaborate with other teachers. Even if we don't use our peers lesson plan word for word, it at least gives us somewhere to start, so we can edit it to our own teaching styles. Anyways, it looks like this is going to be a great year over all and I can't wait :)

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