Significant Teaching Experience

I have been able to take over small groups during the maths section of the day. Maths is the Australian way of saying math or mathematics. The school I am placed in has combined grades, so I have been working with the grade 3-4. This is a combination of students in grades 3 and 4. For maths they are separated into two ability-level groups. I have taken over the higher of the two groups.
The grade 3-4 teachers follow a program called 'maths plus', which was handed to me to base my lesson off. I quickly realized the similarities in our math programs at home to the maths plus program in Australia. Upon glancing at the program I realized that the weeks assignments were purely worksheets. I realized I had to stick to the program somewhat but wanted to add some creativity to increase student's interest levels. I quickly began looking through resources to find math games and activities that focused on the same concepts. One lesson focused on addition and the laws of properties, so I incorporated a game with dice. Students were competing with a partner to reach 100 points. They rolled the dice and added the numbers to find the sum, they continued to do so keeping tracking mentally of their sum. I threw in a couple of rules to make the game a little more interesting. The students responded very well to this game and were grateful to be doing something different.
I continued the lesson by having students write their own definitions of the commutative property (this was the focus of the lesson). The students were very caught off-guard by this requirement. They were very apprehensive about writing definitions of math terms. The day before we spent the whole maths lesson working on the commutative property, so I knew students had a firm grasp of the concept. After complaining the students buckled down and wrote some definitions. I had the students share their responses, which proved to be a nerve-wracking experience. Every student in the group had written a clear and correct definition and I felt extremely proud. I provided each and every student with words of encouragement and they seemed to appreciate them very much. At the end of this lesson I truly felt that the students took away an understanding of a somewhat difficult math concepts, as well as a boost of confidence.