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.