(Sorry I couldn't figure out how to rotate the picture)

On this day, the students were working with thermometers. This concept was new to most of the students. Many had never seen a thermometer before, nor have they ever used one. The concept of being given a temperature and then coloring it in on the thermometer was fairly easy for most of the students. Only one or two students seemed to being struggling with this concept.

In this photo students are first given a picture of a there thermometer and then asked what is the temperature. The second part, the students were given a temperature and then asked to color it in. Before the students were allowed to go off and work on this page, my mentor teacher explained to the students what a thermometer was, why, and how it was used. She then presented the first problem to the class and went through it with them. She informed the class that for the first 6 the picture is given and you just have to find where the colored line stops and follow the time to the number on the side. She then went on to explain how the last 3 walked them through number 7. She taught them that it is like the first half, but this time you are given the number and you want to color up the line until you are at that number. While, I think her explanation to the class was important and well thought out, I think that this worksheet does not expand their knowledge on this new topic.

These problems did not seem to expand the students thinking. Nor did it provide the students with any high level thinking. Now, I think these problems were good when the students were first introduced to this topic, but after their introduction they should have been given something a little more challenging. The teacher could have asked the students to use the thermometer into a story problem, or even gave them a more challenging problem such as in the morning the temperature was 55 it increased to 13 degrees through out the day what was the highest temperature of the day? Something like this would allow the students to think deeper then just finding 50 and coloring the picture in.

This student was like most of the other students approach he listened to instruction and then completed the worksheet. When watching the students finishing this worksheet I noticed that most of the students rushed through it with little difficulty. My thinking that this was because the task was just a little to simple for them. I understand that my mentor teacher is following the book like she is told to do, but to make sure that the students had a solid understanding of this task maybe she should have gave them some more challenging problems. However, this is just my opinion as an observer.

Overall, this is an important task to learn and understand, but I feel it could have been a little high level thinking for the students. The worksheet they were given seemed liked busy work rather then understanding an important concept.