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.