Families

Children's families have a major impact on their learning styles, prior learning, personalities, and abilities when they enter a classroom. Every child is unique and so is every family, so the children in an individual classroom will have come from very different backgrounds, which can make creating lessons that will engage all students difficult, at times.

I feel that the teacher must have interactions with each child's family in order to gain perspective on why a child acts the way he or she does. When meeting a student's parents, teachers are able to see where the child came from and what kind of attitude his or her parents have towards schooling and other aspects of the child's life.

When my teacher does "thumbs up, thumbs down" with her students each day, most of them share something about their families, and I am always surprised when she responds to their statements because she is almost always already aware of the situation. One student in the class said that her mother had been really sick the night before, and the teacher commented on the fact that her mom's new baby would be coming soon and she would feel better soon. Every week I get a new example of how she is involved and engaged in the students' lives and families.

I know that it has taken her many years of teaching to develop these kinds of relationships, but I hope that, since I have had it modeled for me so early, that I will be able to do the same thing she does with my students' families quickly after beginning to teach.

Long Range Plan

I am glad we have had the opportunities to write our own long range plans and talk about them with our classmates. The format we have been using seems like it will be helpful to us in the future when planning lessons. I'm not sure exactly how much they are going to be used when we actually get out into the field, though, and I would like to know what everyone else's field teachers have told them about this.
When Shannon and I asked to see our teacher's long range plan, she thought it was kind of funny, I think. She said that her principal doesn't make them keep them, as long as they are able to produce, when asked, what they are doing on a given day. She keeps hers more in a calendar format in her grade book, and she showed us that she always writes in pencil so that she can change it if the students aren't grasping a concept or if the days get disrupted for some other reason.
One thing that concerns me about long range plans, if they are used by teachers "religiously" is that if the students aren't getting something, you may not be able to spend too much time explaining it, or you will push everything else back until you simply run out of time. To remedy this in my plan, I planned three days for my final project to sum up the unit, and would use this time as flexible time to reteach anything that the students weren't understaning.
I think that, regardless of whether we will be required to do something this formal in our future careers, this project has been a positive learning experience for me.

Second Lesson

Last Wednesday, Shannon and I taught our second lesson. I was very excited to get to teach about dragonflies, and I thought that the activities that we prepared would be fun and engaging for the students. I was a little nervous, however, because Dr. Mayer was going to be observing us teaching. The main thing that I was trying to work on personally in this lesson was slowing down, because in my first lesson I talked WAY too fast and wound up completing my lesson more quickly than I needed to.

During our lesson, the kids seemed really engaged and seem to enjoy it. We knew that they had been studying lots of different kinds of insects in their science class, so we tried to tie into what they already knew and build upon that. During Shannon's part of the lesson, she read them a story about dragonflies and then led them in a discussion about the life cycle of dragonflies. During my portion, I talked with them about dragonflies' body parts and then had them create their own dragonflies out of play-dough. They loved the activity, and it was so much fun to watch them create their little insects!

When I conferenced with Dr. Mayer on Friday, she complimented our lesson and told me that we kept the students engaged the entire time with our frequent questioning. She also said that she liked the activities we chose. One thing she suggested for me to do differently next time was to model the play-dough creations for the students ahead of time, because one child in the class seemed a little confused about what he was expected to do, however I was able to remedy that by giving him a little bit of individual attention.

Something I found amusing that I wanted to include for everyone's entertainment: When Shannon was reading the book in the car that morning, (since I had checked it out from the library, she hadn't seen it yet) she noticed a page discussing the dragonflies having intercourse. The page went something like, "hello dancing dragonflies...your dance sparks new life..." and after laughing for a good five minutes, we decided to tape the pages together so that we wouldn't have to answer any uncomfortable questions. We still aren't sure what the appropriate age to read something like this would be. Any suggestions?

Assessment

How does your co-operative teacher use assessment?
What are your experiences this semester with assessment in the field?

Questions:
-What assessments are used?
-How frequently are students assessed?
-How are the results used?

My field teacher uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to discover where her children are developmentally. In reading classes, she uses the tests provided in the curriculum, which I sometimes find to be a little bit difficult for the level at which the children are operating. For math, she provides manipulatives for each student to represent the problems they are doing and then walks around and discusses each child's answer with them as they finish.

She uses this information to plan for future lessons and to slow down in her teaching approach, if necessary. Since she has the lower groups level-wise for both her reading and math classes, she tries very hard to take cues from what they are learning in order to structure her lessons.

I think that the use of variety in her classroom helps each student succeed, since if a child doesn't do well with one sort of assessment, she has the opportunity to observe them in a different form of assessment, and she can tell that perhaps it isn't that the student doesn't know what he or she is doing, just that they didn't understand the method of the assessment.

Case Study vs. Field Study

Write about any developmental differences you've observed between the case study child you focused on and the children in your field classroom.

Questions:
What can the children in your field classroom do that your case study child might not be able to do yet?
What difference do you notice in the way the primary grade classrooms are structured in comparison to ECDC?

In my field classroom, I observe 23 second graders, as opposed to the single three-year-old girl I observed at ECDC. Obviously, there is quite a large gap in the ages of these children, so the activities that they participate in are going to be very different.

I observed my case study child at recess and during snack time, so I didn't have an opportunity to observe her during class time, however, from my previous observations at ECDC, I feel like the classrooms there are much less structured that they are in my second grade public school classroom. The children move to and from activities mostly at their choosing, with the teacher occasionally interrupting them for a read aloud or snack time.

At Drayton Hall, the day is very structured and every free minute of the day is assigned a specific task. Students barely have time for choosing activities in which to participate, they must move from one subject to another quickly and quietly, and the only time we observe them doing anything other than actual class work is when the teacher gets to grab about fifteen minutes a day to ask the children if they are "thumbs up or thumbs down" where they go around the classroom and talk about what kind of day they are having, however, even this tiny, important sharing time is rushed due to the children having to hurry and leave for their reading class.

I definitely prefer the relaxed atmosphere of ECDC to the busy, structured one of public school, but I understand the need for the increased pace at the grade school level to meet all of the required standards with increasing pressure from the federal and local governments to improve test scores.