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.

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