The importance of not only the first 5 minutes of the class, but the last 5 minutes are just as important!

So today Julia and Katie gave their presentation/ thematic lesson plan. It was a little bit messy and unclear but their idea and hearts were in the right place. The one thing that stood out to me was at the end when we gave feed back we talked about the importance of not only the first five minutes of class but also the last fives minutes of class. This struck me as something that was ever so obvious, but can be hard to plan for. It's like writing a paper and you have your thesis that lays down the the topic and what you will be talking about, and then you have your conclusion that wraps everything up and brings you back to the main idea of the paper. This is what we as educators should be doing in our class, now, I know one can't do this for all the classes, like everyday. BUT, I think it could be important to this once to three times per lesson. Maybe once the first day you do the lesson, so people are sure of whats going on and what to be exploring, another time towards the middle of the lesson and the one big conversation at the end of the lesson, this could even be considered your critique.

Something Aaron talks about a lot is staying away from talking about their feelings especially in a middle or highschool setting. They are already going through a lot and don't really feel comforitable talking about their feelings with their cohort, I mean that makes sense, not a lot of college students or adults really like talking about how they feel in front of big groups of people. So something to stay away from in that last 5 minutes of class would be saying something like " how do ya'll feel about that?" or "So what do you all think", instead ask them questions that lead back to the core elements you involved in the lesson and using that time as a motivator for the next time the students come to class.