Observing Elementary School Lessons: Reflection on Social Studies & Reading, Papers of History of Education

Download Observing Elementary School Lessons: Reflection on Social Studies & Reading and more Papers History of Education in PDF only on Docsity! Mia Allushuski EDU 295/382 April 27, 2009 Social Studies/Reading Lessons Reflection Over the past week, I had the opportunity to observe seven different social studies/reading lessons taught by my peers. These lessons were performed in local elementary schools in classrooms where we had observed throughout the semester. My peers and I were divided into teams of two, and we had the task of creating social studies/reading lessons (aligned with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study) to be taught in fifty-minute time periods in front of our students, cooperating teachers, peers, and professors. The overall experience was truly invaluable, and I learned a great deal from both observing and teaching. We began our week on Monday, April 20 th , 2009, and on this day I observed a kindergarten and a 2 nd grade classroom in one of the highest performing elementary schools in the district. This was also the school where I had completed my EDU 203 Field Experience in a 4 th grade classroom. The first lesson my peers and I observed was in the kindergarten classroom, and I think I can pretty much speak for everyone when I say that these particular kindergartners were extremely well behaved. I was very impressed by one student’s ability to reference the educational term of “chunking” when asked how he knew that the teacher’s sign spelled the word “Saturday” and not “Monday.” My two peers who performed the social studies/reading lesson in this classroom taught a lesson on Earth Day. They began their lesson by reading Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” to the kindergartners, which I feel was an excellent choice given Dr. Seuss’s popularity with young students and this particular book’s relevance to the topic of Earth Day. My two peers shared some interesting facts about the earth with their students, such as how much water is used to flush the toilet, and how much trash the average person throws away each day (4 lbs.!). For the average trash statistic, they passed around a 4 lb. bag of sand so that the students could physically feel how much trash each person throws away each day. I thought this was a great example to provide, and I think that the students would have benefited even more if the instructors had provided concrete examples like the sand bag for each earth statistic that was given (some of the facts seemed a little bit abstract for kindergartners to understand by just reading them). The Earth Day song that the instructors taught the students at the end of the lesson went very well, and the students seemed to enjoy their class book pages that they created for Earth Day. The next classroom we moved to was a 2 nd grade classroom, and my peers teaching in this classroom taught a lesson on producers and consumers. They first chose a book with lots of engaging pictures and text on each page, and it made for an easy way to provide many examples on the concept of goods and services. The instructors then had certain students act out different roles of producers and consumers in the community, such as a grocery shopper, chef, and a construction worker. I thought that this was a great touch to the lesson because acting is such a concrete method of delivering complex content. This lesson finished with a group activity involving the categorization of different printed images in terms of producers, consumers, goods, and services. My one critique about this portion of the lesson has to do with the number of students the instructors assigned to each group. I overheard the classroom teaching assistant tell one student who wasn’t very involved with the group to “get working with the group,” and it seems like the students should have been placed in a little bit smaller groups. Luckily this one student did get moved to a group where there were fewer students, and I think both groups were better off as a result. My peers and I returned to the classrooms again on Wednesday, April 22 nd , and on this day, we observed in a lower performing school with very little socio-economic diversity. The first lesson we observed was in another kindergarten classroom, and before my peers began their lesson, we were able to observe the cooperating teacher perform the morning calendar ritual with her students. The classroom environment was a little different in this classroom compared to the other kindergarten classroom we had observed at the higher performing elementary school. For example, in this classroom, the teacher sat in a chair in the front of the classroom by the calendar while all of her students stayed seated quietly at their tables. The teacher spoke in an extremely monotone voice, and the children repeated everything that she said when prompted. In the previous kindergarten classroom, the students were seated on the carpet in front of their teacher while she did the morning calendar, and the teacher used a very enthusiastic and energetic voice while having different students help her with the calendar. When my two peers took over and began their lesson on the rainforest with the kindergartners, they did an excellent job of engaging the students right away with jungle background music and a “flight simulation.” They read a great book on the Amazonian Rainforest to the students, and had several Wake Forest students stand-up and sing a song that corresponded with the book at the end of the lesson. While the song was a great touch, I think I would have taught the song immediately upon reading the book instead of coming back to it at the very end of the lesson. In addition, one of the instructors was under the impression that they were going to sing the song right after the book was read while the other instructor wanted to do it at the end of the lesson. The two instructors had to discuss this miscommunication in front of everyone, and I think it would have been best if the song was just performed right after the book was read. The instructors had the students break into groups of three for the second half of the lesson, and they were to fill-in-the-blanks about what they did on their make believe journeys to the rainforest, and draw pictures. The problem was, most kids wanted to draw pictures instead of write sentences, and there were quite a few upset students because some of their fellow classmates got to draw pictures while they had to write sentences. If this lesson were performed again in the future, I would give students a choice of how they would like to express what they had learned as opposed to assigning specific roles. After the kindergarten lesson, we moved into an older classroom of third graders at the same school. The lesson performed in this classroom was on the topic of citizenship, and the two instructors began the lesson with an affinity diagram. I really like the concept of affinity diagrams, especially at the beginning of a lesson. They provide an excellent opportunity for students to access prior knowledge, and they work at creating a broad definition on the topic that will be studied. After completing the diagram, the two instructors read the book “Roxa Boxen” to the students. It might just be me, but I found this story a little difficult to understand. The story is supposed to tell about a group of children who create their own make-believe community with their own rules, etc., and it can be used to show how citizens work together to establish a community. Stories on citizenship are hard to find (as I learned when searching for a book to accompany my own lesson that I taught on citizenship), but I just got a sense that there were a good number of third graders who were talking or off-task when the instructors were reading “Roxa Boxen.” At the end of the lesson, students acted out different community jobs and explained why those jobs are important in every community. This was a great touch to the lesson,