Today I taught my science lesson, alongside my co-teacher,
Kalya. Our lesson was a review of all five senses, which the students have been
learning about throughout the duration of our time at the elementary
school. I was very pleased to realize
the excitement many of the preschools had about learning the five senses, which
became very evident when they all cheered at the fact that we would be working
at stations to practice all five of our senses. In previous visits, the
preschoolers were quieter and less responsive. However, their growth truly
showed as many of them raised their hands to answer questions and responded correctly
for the most part! Leading the lesson went smoothly, as we broke the students
into pairs and had our assistant teachers run each of the stations. Students
had four minutes to interact with each activity and were successful in visiting
each station. Each assistant teacher had a checklist to fill out which assessed
the learning that took place in each station.
Because this was the wrap up, or review of the five senses, we
considered these checklists to be a summative assessment to find out what the
students knew or would require further practice with! We walked around and
facilitated the station work and prompted students with questions to check for
understanding, clear up confusion, and push learning further!
I had
two main goals going into this clinical experience. My first goal was to gain
experience working with children who are considered English Language Learners.
This is because before this experience, I had limited experience working with
ELL students and I feel that simply working with them is one of the best ways
to improve your own teachings. This lesson was the first time I was able to
lead a class and I was able to reflect on a lot based off of it. I lead the
beginning discussion, introducing the topic for the day and interacting with
the class as a whole. I found that the students were extremely energetic, which
made me even more enthusiastic. I made sure to speak clearly and at an
appropriate rate for both, preschool age students as well as ELL students, as
well as used hang motions and facial expressions. One thing I experienced was
that at times I was unable to understand some of the student responses. In my
own experience, this can happen in any early childhood classroom for a number
of reasons, accents or the learning of the English language is another reason
this can occur. This is something that one could expect when interacting with
someone else who may speak differently from you. In the moment I politely asked the student to
respond again to see if I could understand them more clearly. Sometimes this
will work, other times teachers may have to ask them to reword it, explain in a
different way, or ask them to show you. The use of visuals for them to point at
and state is something else that may come in handy in future instances such as
this one. I continued to gain more experience in working with ELL students from
this lesson, as I paid closer attention to one student at random in order to
collect anecdotal notes for our assignment. I was able to observe her
interactions with a peer and with all of the assistant teachers. I also
interacted with her, prompting her with questions and listening for her
responses. I will discuss more about her
struggles in the following paragraph, as it contributed greatly to my second
goal. Overall, this lesson found great
success in helping me work toward my goal of gaining experience with English Language
Learners and I felt that today was one of the most successful days in respect
to the self-growth I experienced as an educator.
My second
goal centered around the fact that I wanted to observe some of the difficulties
that English Language Learning students experience in the classroom and use
these observations to reflect upon later and think about what I could or would
do differently in order to improve their experiences in and outside of the
classroom to better their education. My focal student during this lesson was a
little girl who was considered to be an English Language Learner. I observed
her at each station and interacted with her periodically. She showed many signed of struggle throughout
the lesson that allowed me to reflect on!
At most of the stations she appeared confused as to what was expected of
her for a number of reasons. One instance in particular showed that she did not
have the vocabulary necessary in order to be successful at that station. Because of this, it would be the teacher’s
job to define those words in a way that she would be able to make meaning out
of them. The words she struggled with were “hard” and “soft” which took place
at the sense of touch station. One way
to do this would be to have the student physically interact with one or more of
the “soft” objects and one or more of the “hard” objects. As she does that,
should would state the word and ask the student to repeat it! She would put it
in a sentence saying “This ball is hard” and “This toy is soft”. After gaining
scaffolded practice with each of these terms, then they could attempt to move forward
and allow the student some individual practice. I now realize that this type of
direct instruction could have been beneficial to many of the ELL student’s
learning during this lesson. I strongly believe in the important of including
hands on learning and exploration for all students, but especially those who are
new to the English language.
This
experience has allowed me to move closer to my two main goals that I set out
with at the beginning of the semester. It has amazed me that with the small
amount of interactions I had with these students, the amount of growth I have experienced
as an educator. Pairing these experiences with the learning that has taken
place in our college courses has caused me to realize the importance of
applying what we have researched about into your classroom, as well as, being
extremely mindful and intentional in your teachings. Overall, I felt that this experience
has helped me to improve my overall professionalism in the field and made me
feel strongly in the fact that I wish to always improve my teaching practices.
EXCEEDS: I went over the word count of 1000. J
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