Time to Write that Reflection…

Last week I taught a particularly intense science lesson. The kids were all over the place. The noise level got a little out of control. By the end of the lesson I couldn’t tell if it had gone fabulously or terribly. As soon as the kids left for the day I immediately began to reflect on the lesson. I thought to myself “Well, the kids were really exploring and getting excited about the content. On the other hand, were they really learning or just messing around? Is there a way I could have kept the students on track more effectively? Hmmm, that could be good to add to my paper.” I was thinking about all the things that would be good to add to the paper until I realized “Oh my gosh, I don’t even need to write about this. This is just life!” I think this means I’ve officially taken the first step towards become a reflective teacher. I reflect at the end of each day. It feels so naturally, the teaching process wouldn’t feel complete without it!

Later than night I sat down to look at the students work. The lesson centered around making scientific observations (of our snails) and then making inferences using those observations. This is what I saw..

I highlighted some of the particularly thoughtful observations and inferences. Looking at the evidence of the students work it was clear to me that the students had a general idea that observations inform inferences. However, I noticed that the students certainly needed some clarification and more practice. This informed my practice for the next day. We talked more about them the next day and I wove observations and inferences into the next few lessons. I have been looking at the evidence from each lesson and using it to inform my next lessons. I find that the kids appreciate the clarification as much as I do!

This quarter I’ve been letting the work I do in the classroom inform my blog posts. I’ve also been asking open-ended questions and eliciting my cohorts suggestions and ideas!My favorite blog that demonstrates my process as a reflective teacher is called “Time to Take Charge.” I was happy to be able to participate in my cohort’s blogging discussion.

The Realities of Teaching Science in the Classroom

This week my kids and I journeyed into the magical world of snails. My CT was generous enough to give me a week’s worth of science lessons to go crazy with! I wanted to work on having the kids design and execute experiments themselves. Thus, snails seemed like the perfect choice!

During our first science lesson the students made observations and inferences about the snails. My goal was to have the students really think about the difference between an observation and an inference. Many of them jumped to making statements about the snails without any evidence first. This lesson served as a way to get the students really interested in the snails and get them excited to learn more.

The next lesson I wanted to have the students design their own experiments. It ended up getting a little crazy pretty quickly. I settled on us designing an experiment together and having the students conduct the experiment with their partners. Over the course of the next few days the students conducted the experiments. They recorded the process and their findings as small groups. Then we all came together and shared!

All in all the experience was pretty amazing and educational. I learned that teaching science is really fun but is also a challenge. I struggle to let things go and turn the classroom over to the kids. But it was pretty great when I finally did!

Disability Awareness in Classrooms

We’re beginning a unit on the human body center around disability awareness. Over the course of the next month students will have the opportunity to go through their daily tasks with a manufactured physical disability. Students will be able to experience the day in a wheel chair, blind folded, with their arm in a sling or with crutches. Each student will get the opportunity to experience each of the different disabilities if they so choose.

The unit was introduced today by looking at the word “disability.” The students worked together to think about the root word “able” and then decipher the meaning of “disabled.” By the end of the lesson the students were excited to share their own personal connections to disabilities. We begin the actual activity next week but I’m excited to see how the students feel after a full day with the manufactured physical disability. Updates to follow!

Snails in the Classroom= Highly Suggested

At this point I’m thinking snails might be absolutely necessary in my future classroom. They are super low maintenance, slimy, awesome, totally weird looking but in actuality harmless! Plus the fact that they can go dormant when kept in a cool place (AKA summer vacay) is an added bonus. I’m a full grown adult but I flipped out with excitement when I got to learn about snails by making observations, creating diagrams and asking scientific inquiry questions about the little guys. I can only imagine that these creatures would be the perfect vessel for teaching kids about the natural world as well as teaching them basic scientific practices! Now I need to see if my CT will let me incorporate them into this Springs curriculum!

Time to Take Charge

Before I started the week at my placement I decided that it was time to make a change. Don’t get me wrong the kids are delightful, hilarious, inquisitive, button-pushers, essentially everything that a group of third graders should be. And I love them. And I’m excited to teach them! But I noticed there was a little bit of a difference between the way that the students treated their main teacher and the way that they treated me. When I conduct a lesson the children engage and are very respectful so things go well. But during the time I’m in the classroom there are some subtle differences.

When I teach a lesson the kids want to share everything possible. They know their main teacher does not accept comments that aren’t pertinent and thoughtful. So they’ve been trying out the “One time my dad went…” comments with me. And to be honest I don’t mind the comments as long as they don’t go on for an unreasonable amount of time. I know it’s important for kids to share. But I don’t want whole lessons getting bogged down by sharing time. Then there’s the issue of the little comments that the kids make to me during down time. They are never rude or inappropriate but they’re certainly more of something you would say to a friend than to a teacher. I love that the kids want to chat with me but I want them to see me as a teacher.

So back to this week… The change. I decided to be firm, not strict with the kids. When I was giving the kids information about the day or directions for what to do I would finish what I was saying completely before allowing the kids the ask questions. Before I allowed a student to ask a question I would make sure to check-in beforehand to make sure it was a pertinent statement. I made sure not to engage with students that made “curious” remarks. I also personally followed up on some behavior issues, taking charge of the management of these situations from beginning to end. So far I’ve seen a big difference in the way that students interact with me. And to my surprise and relief: The kids still seem to like me maybe even more than before!

When Do We Go Overboard With Incentives?

I’ve been in many classrooms, some well managed and some managed poorly. I noticed that the classrooms with really well behaved children always seemed to be the ones with behavior plans. There was some sort of incentive system. Three gold stars gets you a visit to the treat bucket, a red dot means you stay in a recess, and the list goes on. I honestly thought that incentive systems were really the only way to go. Until recently…

A while back we started a conversation about whether or not incentives have a long term positive effect on the classroom. Do incentive based classrooms help children develop intrinsic motivation and a genuine thirst for knowledge? The more I thought about it, the more I thought that a rewards/ punishment system may not be great for kids long term.

I thought back to the classrooms I had been in and everything I had witnessed. I helped out in a classroom with a very elaborate incentive system. Time and time again the same students would not get the treats that their peers received. Sure they’d get something every now and again but I would notice the same students getting treats very regularly. I remember the look on the kids’ faces when they didn’t get treats. It was a combination of trying to act cool, like they didn’t care, with just a hint of jealousy and pain thrown in.

There has to be another way to get a classroom running smoothly. Something that doesn’t involve copious amounts of sugar with a helping of sadness. Now I just need to figure out what that is…

Making Kids Care About the Environment!

A wonderful representative from Project Learning Tree came into speak with us about how we can teach environmental sciences in our own classrooms! The overarching theme of the seminar was that we need to help children become captivated by and enthralled by nature before they start protecting it. I’ve been guilty of barking “throw that in the recycle” to the students in my class. I’m ashamed to say that it never occurred to teach children to love nature before asking them to go out of their way to protect it. Now that I hear it, it seems so simple. And genius!

There are so many different ways that teaching environmental sciences can be incorporated into other disciplines!

Teachers are required to read and assign books from a slew of genres. There are fiction and non-fiction books that deal with the environment and its protection. Incorporating these books into read- alouds and the subsequent lessons would be fairly easy. Books that deal with the concept of using up a limited resource are a great gateway for having a discussion about sustainability and our earth’s finite resources!

The arts are also a wonderful place to tie in the environmental sciences. Drawings, paintings and sculpture based on our surroundings is a good start. It’s easy to walk outside the classroom and have students collect/ photograph something that they would like to replicate. Even something as simple as going outside and sketching a flower or tree is a nice way to get connected to nature.

Adding environmental sciences to math sounds REALLY fun! If the students need to learn how to make tables and graphs they can collect data from the environment! I can’t imagine students wouldn’t be excited to make their own data as opposed to using the contrived data provided by the math book publishers. The activity we did today would be a great activity for collecting data! The student’s learned about camouflage by finding different colored toothpicks in the grass. The students could create the initial table (like the one below) and then make a bar graph out of the data!

 

Adding environmental sciences to other subject areas just takes a little planning and divergent thinking! 

Is There Room for Sports in School?

Before I begin, let me clarify. When I talk about “sports” in not talking about kids playing sports. I refer to America’s obsession with pro-sports and the way that translates itself in the classroom.

When I began my internship year one of the first things I noticed about the kids was the multitude of pro-sports jerseys in the classroom! Soccer, basketball, college football, NFL, NHL… we had it all! And not only were the kids wearing the jerseys, they were talking sports too. There was a lot of “hey, did you watch the game?” for third graders. Students whispered the merits of their particular team to others during lessons. And then recently there was the issue of the lone 49ers fan in a sea of his Seahawks classmates. I was a little concerned. And I must admit that my own apprehension towards pro-sports certainly colored my view of them in the classroom.

But all of this changed over the course of the last week. I mentioned the 49ers fan in my class of Seahawks… I was pretty worried about what was going to go down between the kids but neither myself nor the teacher had to step in at any point. The kids were totally respectful to one another and didn’t bad mouth each other for a second! Then this Friday 3 different kids showed up wearing the “Number 24” jersey. The two boys were already friends and had planned to wear their jerseys on the same day while the other student, a quiet girl, had just randomly chosen to wear hers. The day started out normally but by recess the three of them were inseparable. They were running around and had even named themselves “Team Skittles.” I was so shocked. This girl who was nice to everyone but didn’t really have any good friends in the class was suddenly running around like one of the gang razzing the other kids. This week has really shown me that there is room for sports in school! They help teach children how to be tolerant of others preferences and beliefs as well as creating bonds between the least likely students!

What it means to be a “good reader”

Reading Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It has been an enlightening and informative experience. She writes about the struggles that young readers have and the work that they do to grow more confident and because “good readers.” She argues that reading instruction and lessons should not just take place in the primary grades. This very important work needs to continue on in every grade and in the various content areas. It isn’t fair for a math teacher to assume that all her students will understand the text in the math books that she provides them.

Tovani argues that good readers are those that use strategies to help them make meaning of the text. She provides a long list of strategies that would help a perplexed reader of any age:

• Make a connection between the text and your life, the world or another text
• Make a prediction
• Stop and think about what you’ve already read
• Ask yourself a question and try to answer it
• Reflect in writing on what you’ve already read
• Visualize
• Use print conventions
• Retell what you’ve read
• Reread
• Notice patterns in text structure
• Adjust your reading rate: slow down or speed up

I hope to be able to introduce these strategies to my students because I think that they would have helped me. Understanding the difference between decoding and comprehension is so important. Just because you can read it doesn’t mean you’ll understand it right away. Good readers use different tools from there literary toolbox to help decipher the text. 

Pinterest: A Valuable Teaching Tool

Over the course of this program we’ve been looking at what the web has to offer to us (future) teachers. We’ve talked about twitter and blogging to no end and they are really very helpful. One thing that I’ve been thinking about and exploring is Pinterest! I started out using Pinterest for recipes, clothing and home décor. Then a teacher friend of mine suggested that I look at it for project ideas. I ended up finding pages full of great ideas (especially when it comes to crafting ideas!!!)…

Here are some of the great pages I discovered:

Science project pins

Writing project pins

Kids crafting pins

And my personal favorite…. Teacher fashion pins!

I like the idea of using Pinterest when I have an idea that I want help with as opposed to finding a “cute project” and making in fit in with what our class is doing. I don’t think that is meaningful or useful. Like Routman says “we must teach with a sense of urgency.” We don’t have time to waste on Santa Claus worksheets or cool Popsicle stick projects unless there is a clear purpose for your particular students. I also look forward to using Pinterest to get ideas for cheaper ways to make certain materials (homemade mod podge, play dough, etc.). Lastly, Pinterest could be a great site to use in the classroom. Students can create pins with links to their own or others blogs and pin them a common class board! I think that Pinterest will be very useful if used carefully and intentionally!