If You Can Hear Me Clap Once – Blog 8

Moorea C -

Hey everyone! I hope you are having an amazing day as usual 🙂 This week I will be talking about my experience grading the pre-tests and teaching 2nd grade!

I’m not going to talk too much about the pre-tests but I did want to touch on one important thing, which is the mistake I made in the grading process. Most of the time, when a teacher creates a test to give to a class they will create bubble sheets for the students to fill out so that the grading process is for the most part quick and easy. Unfortunately, I forgot about that factor and did not have the students fill out any bubble sheets and ended up having to fill out about 135 sheets by hand in order to do my item analysis (examining the students responses for each individual test question). Filling out the sheets itself isn’t too much of a big deal it’s just more the fact that it took about five hours to complete my grading of the pre-tests when it could’ve taken closer to two if I had the students fill out bubble sheets. Other than that hiccup, the grading went well and with the item analysis I was able to adjust my lesson to talk more/less about certain topics for each class.

As for the most exciting part, I finally got to be in the classroom as a teacher this week with the 2nd graders! I did my group lesson and activity with the first class from 9:35-11:00 and did my individual one with the second class from 1:20-2:45. I definitely learned a lot throughout this process, including how to recapture the students attention when it started to get noisy. If the class started to get too loud or if a group of students weren’t paying attention I would shout out the phrase “If you can hear me clap once” and wait for the kids to respond and continue with “If you can hear my clap twice” and so forth until the whole class was quiet and focused on the task at hand. The fact that I was able to go through this process of bringing the noise level down was really cool for me because it meant that I had full control of the class instead of having the other teachers handle that aspect for me. I am super grateful to all of the teachers (Mrs. Sproull, Ms. Mendez, and Ms. Bay) that helped me with this process and took a step back to let me put my skills to the test and help me out when I needed. I will go more into depth about my experience teaching in my final presentation but I will say that I had a lot of fun and the students were easily able to follow along with the curriculum I made.

Overall, this week went really great and I can’t wait to see how it goes with the 3rd graders next week! Thanks for reading!

More Posts

Comments:

All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.

    james_pi
    Sounds like you had a really productive week Moorea! Though, one simple mistake costing you 5 hours is rough, it's interesting to think about how just one thing for each student is ten or more times the work for you since you have to handle every student. Your teaching segment was fun to read about, I remember some of the quieting techniques teachers used for my classes, and I really like your "If you can hear me clap" call-and-response. For your actual study, do you think/notice the times you taught the classes affect the effectiveness of the lesson? Like were the kids more tired in the morning? Or were they more ready to leave later in the day?
    April 6, 2025 at 5:12 am - Reply
    Zoey
    That's really cool you got to experience how it would be to truly control the classroom environment and that you made up your own phrase instead of using existing ones! Did you ever feel overwhelmed with so many kids at once? Was it hard to keep them focused on the lesson at all?
    April 11, 2025 at 8:49 pm - Reply
    moorea_c
    Thanks for the question James! Honestly, I didn't notice too much of a difference in the times effecting the students ability to pay attention. However, I did take that into account when planning out which class would do the group activity and ended up having the early morning class for the 3rd graders do the individual because I wasn't sure if being tired would affect their ability to work together in groups or not. And the other thing I noticed that I will talk about more in my next blog was that the times I taught affected me in different ways such as my energy levels and time management.
    April 13, 2025 at 5:01 pm - Reply
    moorea_c
    Great questions Zoey! I never really felt overwhelmed, although I was a little nervous right at the start. It wasn't too difficult to keep their attention because they were excited to have someone new in the class and using the quieting techniques helped to bring their energy level down whenever it started to get too high.
    April 20, 2025 at 9:45 pm - Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *