Friday, September 9, I spent my first two service hours in Mr. Smith's 6th grade class.  After 15 minutes of self-start, we dove right into math.  Mr. Smith explained that there had been a quiz the day before and there were certain questions that seemed to be causing the whole class problems.  These questions had to do with surface area.

Mr. Smith went through multiple problems step by step.  He explained why he was doing each step and patiently answered each question.  For each problem, students had a white board and a piece of paper.  They would do their work on the paper and then write their final answer on the white board.  Mr. Smith would then ask the entire class to put their white boards in the air and he could see how everyone did on the problem.

For three of the questions, he had the students figure out the area of a rectangle.  Then they multipled it by 2.  Then he had them add these three numbers together.  The final question was to find the area of a box.  When they found the answer, they realized it was the number they had gotten on the previous question.  Mr. Smith was showing them how to make a complex problem simple by breaking it down into it's smaller parts.  Throughout the lesson he kept saying "How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time."

His teaching style seemed to be constructivism.  Each student was active in the learning process.  He went step by step to help the students learn how to solve their own problems.  With each step, he reminded the students of things that they had previously learned, like how to reduce an imperfect fraction, or how to do long division.  He helped the students feel empowered to do these problems on their own.