Tuesday
was our last day working with the students at Brigham Elementary, which was
rather bitter sweet because I have grown to truly enjoy interacting with them
and learning so much from these students! Our engineering lesson
focused in on the building of towers and problem solving how to create a tower
that was as tall as possible but did not fall down.
Gaining
more experience with the English language learning students proved to have its
learning moments for us, as well as, showed me where I had grown since entering
the clinical site however many weeks ago.
One accommodation we were able to make for the students was to present
them with multiple images of towers so that there was a clear understanding of
what a tower was and what we were trying to recreate. In reflection, I believe there
are some other things we could have done to better scaffold the learning of
these young English language learning students. They had never had experience
in building towers with pipe cleaners like we had simply assumed, having had
these experiences ourselves. Some of them wanted to lay it on the ground and
not create a tower that went vertically instead of horizontally. Because of
this, I believe a model tower would be most beneficial for the students. We
also did not take into account the fine motor skills of our kindergarten
students. To create these pipe cleaner towers, we had it set up in a way that
required the students to twist the pipe cleaners together in order to construct
their building. This proved to be very difficult for some of the students which
only required the teachers to help them more than should have been necessary
for a problem solving activity such as this. It is possible to have used
different materials that would allow the students to not have to twist the
materials together, instead stick them together with materials such as marshmallows
and dry pasta. This would make it easier for these students to work with. We
also should have more explicitly stated that their goal was to create a tower
that could stand on its own. They were all competitive and wanted to build the absolute
tallest tower, however, the students did not take into account that adding pipe
cleaner after pipe cleaner would be unable to stand on its own, which they did
not care about in the slightest. Their only goal was to make their tall, which
pretty much missed the whole point of the lesson. By more clearly stating this
goal and posing the problem in a way they could more clearly understand, I believe
we would have witnessed a higher success rate and the students would have been
able to work on problem solving toward creating a tower with these goals in
mind.
Overall, I found this clinical
experience to be helpful in allowing me to reach my goals of gaining more
experiences working with students who are English language learners. Seeing
them interact with their peers and other teachers allowed me to reflect greatly
upon their specific needs that may differ from a general education student when
out in the field. I found their excitement to be just as encouraging as any
other young mind I have come into contact with and I appreciated getting to
work with them on a biweekly basis!
Exceeds: Over the 500 word count! :)
