Teaching on Fridays!

This past Friday ended the first full week of teaching I had!
With my Transition Year class I am doing a short unit on patterns. I have put a lot of work into make examples for them and trying to help them have fun with it. On Friday they started to make there own pattern, and when I showed them my example they were very impressed, which made me feel very confident that theirs will turn out wonderful! I will get to see them on Monday the 19th. They were working so hard on Friday, those patterns will be great to see. With the Transition Years, my cooperating teacher and I split the class in half, she took one half and I took the other half and then we switched after a week. So yesterday, Monday, I started with the second group. I am excited to see what happens with this group because the other one really enjoyed and understood patterns.
In my First Year class we are doing fractions. This is going fine but I am having trouble trying to figure out how to make this topic more interesting. I sort of feel like I am just teaching from the book. Maybe I could talk about cutting up a cake or cookies and bringing it into the class. But for the most part the students are understanding the work.
I am teaching circles in my Second Year class. This has been a very interesting experience. These Second Years are the lowest so they are put in this class to go over math a little slower than the other classes. I was excited when I got this class because this is the level when you really want to excite the students. When I choose to teach circles I thought the students would really understand it and I had come up with a project that would be a very good summery of the whole unit. Then on Friday I really had my eyes opened. I had these second years at the last class of Friday and they were very hard to teach. Everyone was talking to each other and yelling at each other, and they were telling me I was going to fast. It was hard because one student was having trouble with one thing and the others were understanding it. So finally I decided I had to stop my lesson and just do a review. At the end of the class and the end of the day I felt like that class got out of control and I got a little upset over it. I thought about it all weekend and decided I had to rearrange next weeks lessons because I could not move on just because it was in my plans. So over the weekend I came up with a review worksheet (almost like a test) of problems from the homework. I gave this to them yesterday and it was the best class I had had! They did a great job and this helped me see that they are understanding the information.
This experience really showed me a lot! First, its hard to teach the last class on a Friday. And second, lesson plans are not set in stone, they are changeable and should be changed if the students are not understanding something.
I would have to say my first week teaching was a success! It started off a little nerve raking and ended a little crazy but after a weekend off to reflect, I think everything went well. These next 5 weeks (I cannot believe that all that's left!) are going to be a great learning experience.