Last Day at Brigham

Today was our last day to have the opportunity to interact with the pre-K students at Brigham Elementary School.  Within our small groups, we were tasked to create a lesson in which the students would be engaged with the standards surrounding the scientific concept of engineering. When first given this task, I was weary with apprehension because this was a subject area that I did not feel as confident about. As a small group, we took quite a while to brainstorm different ideas on how we could go about explaining this concept to our students. After much discussion, we finally settled on the idea of teaching students engineering through an activity involving parachutes. We thought through different objects that would drop at different speeds so students could understand the concept of force and how ti relates to object weight. We chose objects like an eraser, a marker, a rock, a ball, and lastly a shoe. We first introduced the concept by reading the students a book, then after noticing that there were nine students in the classroom, with two more coming in from the hallway, we decided to split the group up.

I worked with Megan and we decided to review the text before jumping right into the activity. In order to engage the students in the activity, we asked them to be the ones that would drop the parachute to the ground. We tried to ask the same questions repeatedly throughout the lesson to work hard to get our point across that the heavier objects take a faster plunge than objects with less weight. We dropped the parachute two times so students could clearly see the speed of the parachute dropping especially if they happened to not be focused in the front of the classroom where we were at that moment. The second time is when I measured the time and then shared the time with the students so they could start to think about how fast things would go considering most time increments were around one second. The students seemed to be really excited and engaged throughout the activity but I leave concerned about their comprehension of the main concepts of the lesson. Students seemed to keep shouting “Fast or faster” throughout the lesson without really listening to our questions, so I just happen to wonder about if they really do understand the concept. A couple of students once we started comparing and contrasting the different objects used, they were able to differentiate the two and were able to tell Megan and I which would fall faster and which one would fall slower. We just kept trying to repeat throughout the lesson that we were working on their understanding of objects slowing down when they are attached to a parachute. One thing I wish we would have done differently was plan to drop two objects at once so the students could use firsthand the comparison between objects and their speeds. We noticed towards the end of the lesson that the two other teachers, Alaina and Ali, were doing this and in the interest of time, we just had our students turn around to see and I think this also helped deepen their understanding so if I were to do this lesson again, that would be something I would change.

As far as my goals go, I again want to make the point that any opportunity in the classroom is an improvement because it allows me to gain more experience and have more exposure to working with students in a diverse setting. To help students understand the key words of “fast” and “slow” we used hand movements and when saying the word “slow”, we emphasized the word  by producing the word in a slow format, so we dragged the word out and said “sssslllllllooooowww” instead of just saying “slow” as an everyday term. I believe that this played a role in their understanding of the parachute because the students then started to mimic our phrasing and apply it to the parachuted objects correctly. 

Teaching in my Clinical Site

On Wednesday I taught science in my Professional Development School (PDS) placement. I have been placed in a first grade classroom at Oakland school. Through my time there, I have taken over most of the language arts instruction but have not yet had the opportunity to teach a science lesson. Through a requirement in this science course, I was able to sit down and talk to my cooperating teacher about implementing a science lesson. In our classroom, we do science every other week, and social studies the opposite weeks. I was able to choose which science topic I wanted to teach about, either Day and Night or on Ecosystems specifically the Food Chain.

 I chose to focus on Day and Night and went through the curriculum book to pick out a lesson. My cooperating teacher works with another first grade teacher quite closely and together they develop slides in the program, Smart Notebook. I needed to make a decision on whether or not I wanted to just use the Smart Notebook slides or if I wanted to venture off and create a whole new lesson. I decided that since my students are familiar with the Smart Notebook slides, which I wanted to somehow incorporate them. I decided that I would research an activity to help supplement the material presented in the Smart Notebook presentation of Day and Night. I specifically chose to focus on the second lesson in the unit which talked about what determines day and what determines night, and introduces the vocabulary term of rotation. Prior to teaching my lesson, I spent time on sites like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers to find a quick and easy activity to help supplement the content presented. Through research, I found a craft in which visually demonstrates the Earth’s, the suns, and lastly the moons rotation to help the children visually see how those rotations define day and night.

When time came for me to teach my lesson, I became somewhat nervous. I was nervous because I do not have much experience with teaching science, and I have only seen my cooperating teacher actually teach science a few times. This has happened because I am in charge of a fourth grade reading Response to Intervention (RTI) group. My group meets during social studies or science time so this is one area that I feel less confident in teaching. My cooperating teacher did a really great job prior to my teaching affirming me and boosting my confidence. As I gathered the students to the carpet, I felt somewhat relieved because I knew no matter what I was teaching, they were going to be prepared to learn as long as I set them up for success and modeled the same practices that I model earlier in the day when implementing my language arts instruction. There are specific practices that my cooperating teacher uses across the whole day regardless of which content area she is instructing. To gain the students attention and           quiet them down, she says “Sh Sh Sh”, and the students repeat and then are expected to be silent and wait for directions. This is the strategy I use to begin any sort of instruction or assign any sort of direction, and it is the tactic I used to gain my students attention before beginning the science lesson.

As  I have mentioned above, I followed the Smart Notebook slides when presenting the content knowledge to the students and I framed the instruction like a discussion like I have seen my cooperating teacher do the few times I was able to observe her teaching. The students started off being really engaged but as it seems to be a usual occurrence with not only children in general but specifically our students, we quickly had those few friends who started looking off, talking aloud, talking to others, or playing with various things on the carpet. For my personal preference when teaching, I do not found it helpful to stop and correct each of those behaviors. I think you will always have kids that are looking around but if you take the time to stop for every little thing, a half an hour lesson could easily turn into an hour. My cooperating teacher and I have been talking a lot this semester about whether the behavior is a problem for the classroom or just for you, meaning does the behavior impair the learning of others, if not and it just annoys you then those are things that you have to work to just get over. As teachers, we need to pick our battles and chose to correct the behaviors that will impair either the students the learning or the students around him or her. So this is an idea that I try to take with me when I am teaching my students. I have started reflecting on which behaviors are problems or are just an annoyance to me that I can see myself having to work on to just get over. Of course, as we have discussed, these things change year to year when you have different students in your classroom.

With all of these thoughts in my mind, I chose to correct behaviors that were impairing the learning during my lesson. After we moved from the carpet to their desks, my students were excited to begin the crafting task and were all extremely engaged. My students love coloring so I knew I would have to put time constraints on that and the best way to show students this is to use our visual time timer that we have in the classroom. I knew even with this strategy I would have children that continued to work at a different pace, so I did my best to work with the pace of the majority of my students. I gave cutting directions and assembly directions when it looked like the majority of the classroom was ready to move on.  I have three students in my classroom that have cutting modifications so I had to go over to them specifically and cut their large pieces out and they could take on the smaller cutting tasks themselves. I have one student in my classroom that gets ELL support from our ELL instructor. However, his family is starting to wonder if he needs it because he is able to understand all direction and effectively communicate back to us what he thinks or needs. So I didn’t feel that any modifications needed to be made for him. However, after working at Brigham, I feel more confident that if I would have needed to make accommodations, I would have been able to do those more quickly.

Overall the lesson was successful, my students loved it (they have told me how much they like it days after the lesson), and the students were able to grasp the content knowledge that I was working to get across. Here is a picture of the model we created!

My Day to Teach

This week in the classroom at Brigham Elementary School I had the pleasure of being the teacher for the lesson. My partner Laine and I were tasked with creating a lesson for the pre-K students that revolved around the five senses theme, specifically sight. Prior to presenting this lesson, during the planning stages, I reflected on my first experience in this classroom. I thought about how my first interactions with these students presented quite a few anxieties in regards to the language barrier that is associated with English Language Learners. I knew by teaching the lesson, it would provide me with more of an opportunity to talk or interact with the students. The students did not seem very excited or engaged during our first activity during the first experience that we had in this classroom so that was a high concern of mine. I wanted to reflect and when making preparations think about how we could make our activity engaging and one that was easily understandable for all students regardless of background or diversity. These were all different things that were running through my head when trying to think of lesson ideas with Laine and how we could lessen my anxieties.

A little bit about our lesson. As I mentioned our lesson focus was on the concept of the sense of sight. Laine and I had to think about how we would develop a plan that included basic vocabulary that all students would be able to understand. We introduced our lesson with a song, read them a story, and then created a pair of binoculars for students to practice using their sense of sight to then later play a game of “I Spy”. We developed hands on activities for our students so that the concepts we teach would hopefully stick with them. During our activity while we were teaching I noticed that we seemed to have the student’s attention right away. They seemed excited about what we were going to teach and what we were going to do with the materials brought in.

How this lesson and teaching relates to my goals:

As I had previously mentioned, I figured that more progress would be made toward my goals once I became the actual teacher and not just the teacher’s assistant. I believe this statement to be true especially with now having taught in the classroom. When you are the teacher the students look directly to you and it is your job to learn how to effectively communicate your purpose and the concept you are trying to teach. Since I knew we were working with the concept of sight, I knew what I could simple use non-verbal cues to help me get my point across. We used pointing as our non-verbal cue because we could point to our eyes and we could point to the student’s eyes. Later in the lesson we also pointed to different materials around the room to help the students play the “I Spy” game. While we sang the sight song and read the sight book, Laine and I made sure to point to our eyes every time the word sight was used to help our students develop deeper understanding. We also wanted our students to interact with the book so while some of the students are able to speak English fluently, we know that children look to other children to help their learning, so by having the students do the action of pointing to their eyes they were able to make the connection between the word and the concept. I think this really helped with our learning how to communicate with ELL students. This helped me think of my toes and figure what motions I could do to help my students understand.

When the students were interacting with the craft (creating the binoculars for the “I Spy” game) I noticed something else happened in which helped me work toward my goals. I had a strong interaction with the little boy who speaks Spanish primarily, and usually has another boy (I think his brother) translate words for him. I noticed that this little boy needed more direction and I knew it would be a situation that would challenge me so I walked over to his side of the table and sat down to talk to him. I helped him with his tools and I first started pointing to things and speaking in short phrases or speaking slowly. Then I realized how silly it was trying to speak slowly to a child to get them to understand you, it’s the language barrier that’s the problem, not my speech speed. My non-verbal cues seemed to be helping but occasionally he would look up at me and seeking affirmation or sometimes clarification. I began nodding my head yes and then he would continue with his actions but then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew what word “yes” in Spanish. So the next time he looked to me for affirmation I responded with “Si” and he would smile at me and continue his task. I felt really encouraged by this interaction with this student because I felt that I was making improvements in my communication and interactions with English Language Learners.

This experience as a whole and my specific interaction with the one student really helped me recognize the progress I have made while working towards my goals. By interacting with each and every one of these students again, I am again working toward my goal of gaining more experience in working with English Language Learners. I am hoping at the end of this whole experience that I will feel more confident in my abilities to instruct English Language Learners and also communicate with them. The one aspect that I feel that I did not get to work on or have the opportunity to improve upon is the aspect of communicating with English Language Learner’s parents or family members. I need to work on my abilities to translate information so that regardless of the language or cultural barrier, all of my student’s family members are able to be on board with me and what is going on in my classroom.

I hope to continue growing in this aspect of my professional career but I am thankful for this opportunity that has helped me start that journey. 

In the Classroom, Day 3

Today was my third experience in the classroom and my second experience working in the kindergarten classroom. Since, I was just in the classroom with these students last week, I wanted to make it a goal of mine to try and work with the same group of students to see how they differ from activity to activity. This week the teachers focused on recycling and identifying objects according to what product they were made out of: paper, glass, plastic, or aluminum. The teachers worked hard to provide examples through a story to help the students have an idea of different objects that are made out of those materials. During the activity, I chose to position myself where I could work with the same group of students and help them classify objects into different categories. Again, because I had no prior knowledge of the activity before going into the lesson, I didn’t have opportunity to prepare and learn some Spanish words to help translate. However, whenever a student asked what a object was, which happened quite frequently, I was able to provide a variety of examples of that product. I felt that the teachers did a great job at choosing objects that would seem familiar to the students, because while they did ask me what an object was quite frequently, they would sometimes make a guess and just look for clarification. Students that tended to struggle last week with identifying objects did better, however, I could tell most of the students tried to sneak glances at a particular student’s paper. I did my very best to stop this action from happening but I recognize that you can’t always catch every single movement. My goals play a role in today’s activity because like I said while I wasn’t able to learn any new Spanish words, I was able to think of a different way to describe an object or its uses for many students that needed it to provide differentiation. 

As I mentioned in my last blog post I continue to look forward to every opportunity I have in the classroom because it provides me with more and more experience and expose to diverse learners. I am learning to work more and more on my feet and push my thinking deeper to provide a variety of explanations to students. I look forward to my interactions with the students in the pre-K room because I know they have a student in that room who first and foremost speaks Spanish, I believe being in that classroom will push me further and provide me with opportunities to learn some Spanish vocabulary. I can take my adaptability skills that I am learning from the Brigham experience to my PDS placement classroom, since I have a few ELL students there as well. One of my students gets pulled out for ELL instruction. However, as we talked about today in class, even if a student isn’t ELL specified, ALL children need directions explained a different way from time to time. I think about how in my PDS classroom, my students are always asking me “Miss Philpott, I don’t understand what you are saying” and I have to be able to think on my feet and change my wording to provide my students with a better opportunity for learning. I look forward to more experiences at Brigham and more experiences at both Brigham and Oakland to improve my differentiation skills specifically with ELL students.

Exceeds: Over the word limit and related to my PDS placement

In the Classroom Day 2

*My blog experience is one week behind my original schedule because of switching my experience dates around due to illness.

This week at Brigham, I had the opportunity to work in the Kindergarten room. I hadn’t been in this classroom before so I wasn’t sure what type of learners that this class consisted of. I was looking forward to gaining some insight about these students while also playing the role of a teacher’s assistant. Two ISU students taught a lesson on living and non-living objects, students were asked to determine if the item they drew out of a stack of cards was living or non-living. I noticed right away that like the Pre-K classroom, this classroom also had a range of diversities. You could see that multiple ethnic backgrounds were represented in this room which directly correlates to my ELL goals. My overall goal for myself is to first and foremost gain more experience with working with ELL students. By working in the classroom every other week, I am gaining more hours where I am interacting with ELL students. One thing I noticed that differed between the Pre-K room and the Kindergarten room, was that all students are able to speak English in this room. Even if the students are all able to speak English, there are still ethic differences and there is still an opportunity to learn about cultures.

 One situation where I started to think about this, was when we were having the students identify items, a few times I had to provide extra cues to help the children identify what an item was. When reflecting on this situation, I often wonder was it a culture barrier or had they just not been exposed to that item very much? This was a situation where I had to think on my feet and draw on any prior knowledge that I had in my back pocket. This is also one of my goals, for ELL students, I want to get better at providing another way of explaining something so that they are better able to understand me or the direction whether that is using their native language or some other form of communication. However, I challenge this for any students; differentiation occurs for all students not just ELL students. By acting quickly and providing other forms of explanations for my group of students when necessary, I feel that I am starting to my progress in this area of my goals. It is always challenging when students struggle to follow you and I found this to also be true when working with this group. They would answer all of my living questions “YES!” but then tell me it was “Non-living!”, this caused me to struggle to think about how I could make that connection stronger and bridge the gap. As always there is room for improvement, but I can feel confident that I am at least trying to get better. 

 I am also starting to think that the hardest goal for me to work through is going to be communicating with students in their home language. At Brigham, this is Spanish specifically in the Pre-K room, so whenever I am involved with lessons or teaching my own lesson in that classroom, I want to prepare myself to take the necessary steps to be able to communicate with the one little guy. I look forward to continuing to interact with the students at Brigham and continue working through my own personal educator goals.

Exceeds: Exceeded word limit

First Day in the Classroom

Recap from the Classroom:
It was our first day! I am a part of Group A and today we got to venture into the Pre-K classroom for the first time. It was really exciting to see their smiling faces and have them welcome us into their classroom. Last week we planned out that we wanted to do a "Get to know you" lesson with the students but also relate it to science and do some sort of introduction. To complete both of these goals, we created a simple get to know you game to play at the beginning and then planned a basic intro science activity. For the getting to know you game, we had the students gather into a circle and introduced the game Step In, Step Out. Step In, Step Out is a game where each person says something they like, and if you as a participant also like that something then you take a step into the circle. Then you have to take a step back out before the next person can do. We took turns going around the circle so each student  and teacher got to take a turn. We noticed that this was a good activity to start off with however, the students started to repeat each other's answers verses saying something more individualized. Next, we read them the story "What is Science?". We incorporated different questions throughout the book that would keep the children engaged and listening to us. After the story, we went over things we saw in the book and presented them with the task of drawing/coloring their own scientist. As teachers, we walked around during this time and asked the students questions about their drawings. As they were starting to finish up, we wrote each student's name on their paper and asked them what they wrote so we could write what it was so we would have a point of reference for later. We also had the students go around one at a time and verbally share what they drew and tell us their names. Sheets were collected and put into the Pre-K folder for assessment purposes. I am excited to continue planning and implementing lessons for these students.

About our learners:
The Pre-K room has approximately 12 students. The classroom is full of diversities. There are students from a variety of cultures that are visually able to see. We also have students that speak a variety of languages. This was made very clear to us during the game. When we got to one student, we noticed that he started responding in Spanish. None of us teachers, happened to speak Spanish, but the student next to him started speaking Spanish to him and began translating and gave the student's response. I am curious to see how this language barrier progresses and I hope to grow in my abilities to communicate and differentiate my teaching to accommodate this needs.

How I am working through my goals:
For this clinical experience I have developed goals on how to develop myself and my skills when working with English Language Learners. My goals are to be able to differentiate my instruction or change the language I use to best fit my students needs. I also want to make a strong effort to get to know their different cultures and be able to take that knowledge and apply it to how I teach and what I teach. For this first week, since we were just meeting the students, this was the opportunity to get to know what languages and cultures are represented in the classroom. In the Pre-K room, there are students from a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds but also different language backgrounds. One student we think can understand English but seems to only produce Spanish, so I am hoping that I can learn some basic words to try and communicate with this young boy. I want to make sure now that when I am planning my lesson, that I am taking into account the students I met and the different needs I see presented. My goals will continue to be worked through as I spend more time in the classroom but for now, just getting to know the students and starting to classify their needs is a good start to this process.

Working with ELL students has always been something that I have high anxiety about. I just don't feel well prepared for this, I mean I know different strategies, but I just haven't had enough actual life experience with it. Most of the classrooms that I have worked in have not had any ELL students and my current PDS placement classroom, has a couple ELL students but two get pulled out for ELL support services. These services seem to help my students and I am considering observing this teacher to see the kinds of activities he presents to the ELL students. I want to do more practice with various languages but one thing I have on my list of things to do, is take a basic entry level Spanish course at the local community college, in our case, Heartland. I think this would help me gain confidence by learning some basic words/phrases. This experience at Brigham will also help me gain experience and confidence.

Attached are some links to Youtube videos on teachers sharing their strategies for working with ELL students (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lARm7Otokzs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCov6tgNgk4 )

Exceeds: I connected to my current clinical placement, and shared two youtube video links on strategies for teaching ELL students.

Science Autobiography

 My Science Autobiography

My name is Brittany Marie Philpott. I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana but at the age of four, my dad was relocated and parents and I moved to Carol Stream, IL where I grew up. There was were all of my schooling took place.

During elementary school, science instruction was kind of a hit or miss. I remember using balance scales to determine which weighed more and measuring things around the classroom to see which objects were bigger than other objects. I also remember doing various worksheets but I do  not remember what kind of topics we covered when doing the worksheets. In middle school, I remember learning things on topics like space, ecosystems, and dissection labs. In eighth grade we did various group projects and we specifically dissected a worm. In high school, I took biology, chemistry, and physics. In biology we watched a lot of movies and looked at things through a microscope almost every other day. In chemistry, we did various experiments with different chemicals. My favorite lab from chemistry was the day we made our own tie-dye clothes. I made a tank top that I still have/continue to wear to this day.

Science instruction was something that always made me nervous because I felt that I always had to have the correct answers or I would get confused about the instructions and be afraid that I would blow something up. However, within that nervousness, I loved mixing things and learning about different scientific things. I loved working in groups and I still love working in groups collaborating with other individuals. The one part of science that I didn’t like was memorizing all the equations. My physics teacher was new to the program, so that year of science was extremely difficult. I had to teach myself everything from a book which I did not like. I also felt that as a girl science wasn’t something that I needed to know much about, and I felt that it was more for the boys. The boys always seemed to be better at factual concepts. I also grew up in a Christian home and have a strong faith. This relates to science because I believe in creation in the way it is explained through the Bible verses scientific evolution.

After high school, I made the decision to come to Illinois State University to study Early Childhood Education. While here, I knew that I was going to be studying how to implement science lessons in some course at some point throughout my time here. What I didn’t realize, was that I would be exposed to science lessons before then. During my last clinical placement I worked with a third grade classroom and there one of my main responsibilities was to teach the science lesson. I followed the third grade curriculum books and I taught since experiments like which toilet paper was the strongest, the three stages of matter and how the elements go back and forth like melting chocolate, freezing water, etc (pictures below). I discovered that I loved teaching science to my third graders and they loved when I stepped to the front of the classroom because they knew it was science time. While I had the curriculum books to follow I still felt that I needed more preparation in order to teach science to my third graders all together.

I hope to teach at the pre-K/Kindergarten level and I want to make sure that I am providing engaging activities to my students. I hope to learn through this class a variety of scientific activities for students to participate in. I feel that most of my experiences and the experiences of my colleagues are the same, science was never a huge part of our education and sadly this remains true still today. Since I grew up in a world where science was disregarded, as a pre-service teacher I want to learn everything I can so that when I have a classroom of my own, my students do not grow up the way I did, but grow up having a vast exposure to science. Students need to learn to value things other than math and reading, so as a future teacher, one goal I have for myself is to be excited and provide lots of opportunities for science to be integrated into my curriculum plans. 

Science Lesson #1 (Melting chocolate and Freezing chocolate to make chocolate bars)

Science Lesson #2 (Measurement/Cooking concept focus: making cakes!)

Mrs. Reger's 3rd grade classroom that I taught science to.