9.28.2010 Reflection

I really liked the spelling exercise that Mrs. K. used when I first arrived.  I thought that it was a great way to have the students exercise their spelling imaginations.  She also gave each student a chance to give one of their answers, which I thought was a great way to do every child, every day. 

I also observed her giving out “bucks” as a classroom management tool.  Once a month she has a classroom store, where the students can exchange their bucks for fun merchandise in the classroom store.  This is a great way to motivate students to behave in the classroom.  If the students act poorly they get a buck taken away.

Her parts of speech lesson was really good, I liked how she got the students into it by encouraging discussion and getting the students to talk amongst themselves about the parts of speech at their tables and then finishing with a class discussion.  Lots of thinking and talking going on, I love it.  She also surveyed them to see how they were feeling about the lesson itself and if they felt confident. She could use the answers from this discussion to inform her future instruction.  She followed this up with a piece of children’s literature to reinforce the lesson.  This was interesting to me because the lessons that I have written so far that include a piece of children’s literature, have had the story being read first, not second.  I am definitely going to experiment with this lesson structure.  She finished up the lesson with a pronoun worksheet that was based on the book she read.  I think that this helped the students reinforce the lesson by using their recent memory of the story and humorous aspects of it.  Then she had the students take a quiz to put their information into direct use. 

The second lesson that she taught was a social studies lesson about the preamble to the constitution.  She sang the school house rock version of the preamble and had the students sing along with her. Then she guided them through a lesson where they had to use their imaginations to create their own new country and make up the new rules in their countries.  I loved all the questions that she asked them to get them to think about what they would do, why and how.  It really inspired them to get creative and think about their thinking.  I walked around a little bit at Mrs. K's suggestion.  It was kind of awkward for me to just walk around and ease drop on conversations, but I got over it.  I noticed how each group table had a different energy or process of deliberation.  Some were very excited, still some were seriously engaged in talking out how they were going to create their own country.  There was a writer in each group and a thinker and a talker it seemed.