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