A Different Look

Rather than doing the mundane summary of what I saw at the Learning Academy and how I feel based on my observations, I am deciding to take a different approach. I will examine two methods that I found affective and employed higher order thinking. One method being a OG instruction and one in mathematics.

Mrs. Paul changed OG instruction up today. OG is the same thing everyday with the introduction to new consonants and vowels. However, today, she accumulated short vowels already learned into a game, Jeopardy. There were a few changes to the game. There were no teams, and no points were tracked. There was no competition, only camaderie. Here is how it went: students would individually come to the Smart Board, and select a category (each column had a different vowel sound). A picture would appear, and the student would have to say the picture. Then they would spell out the word. Tiffany would often times say a different word. For example, one picture was a mat, however, she said rug. Mrs. Paul would have to remind her that the word needed to have a short vowel sound. All students spelled the word correctly. There were only a few misconceptions about what the picture might be. After the box was selected, the students would have to cross out the box they picked. Kelly was the typical girl. She took quite some time to pick a box. Mrs. Paul would count down from five once Kelly stood there for fifteen seconds.

Overall, I enjoyed this game. It was a great summative assessment to short vowel sounds. However, there are a few things that I may change. For instance, I would make a competition out of it. I would seperate the class into teams. Each team would elect a represenative to come to the board. The represenative would select a box and answer the question. The next team would go, and so on. The team with the most points at the end gets a special prize. I would also change the method of counting down with Kelly. I would put on the Jeopardy music, and then stop it when she needed to hurry up and select a box. Also, rather than having the students remember which box they needed to cross out at the end, this is where the point system comes into play, as well. The teacher would keep track of the scores and who picked what box. Often times there was confusion between two seperate boxes and which one the student originally picked.

For the majority of my time at the Learning Academy, I have only observed OG instruction and reading/writing. However, today I was able to see mathematics instruction which was a real eye opener. After Jeopardy, Mrs. Paul transitioned into the weather for the day, the months, and the days. Mrs. Paul assigns one student a month to do various chores throughout the classroom; one being the weather. This month it is Jacob's turn. I am a firm believer in assigning students duties. I believe that it keeps them involved and it gives them the sense of being needed. When discussing the months and days, Mrs. Paul would ask what the fourth month was, the day after Tuesday, and the month before July, for example. This eased the students into math because it made them count and think backwards. After this, Mrs. Paul told the students to count from 137-165 forward and backward; count by tens to 100 forward and backward; count by two's to twenty forward and backward. With that she introduced the counting of three's. She brought the students over to the empty space by the CD player. She played the counting by two's song, and then had the children first listen to the three's song and then had them do it. During this time, Anthony and Sutton stood in the back and refused to sing and dance along with the rest of their peers. If I were Mrs. Paul I would have the students stand in the circle, and each student would have to come to the middle and sing part of the song and do the dance with it. I love to get students involved and believe that the more they do physically, the better they will learn. Singing songs and dancing are great examples of physical activity that students should be doing in order to learn new material.

After the counting, singing, and dancing. The class began to learn about polygons. Mrs. Paul reviewed and then had the students go and get their clipboard from the back of the class. Rather than having the students all go to the back all at once, I would say something like, "Students wearing red shirts may go to the back," and then "Students wearing jeans may go." Mrs. Pauls class has a habit of all running and pushing each other out of the way. I believe that this method would cut back on the chaos. After retrieving their clipboards, Mrs. Paul gave each student a worksheet with different polygons (i.e. triangles, squares, rectangles). The students had to go around the classroom and write down what they found. This got the students up and out of their seats. It promoted learning yet was learning in a different way. Students were learning through observations and applying rather than learning through lecture.

I am glad I got the chance to see the students in action. My recent blogs have become very dull due to the same kinds of observations. Mrs. Paul is a great teacher and employs been of the stages of Bloom's Taxonomy in her classroom. I love the songs she employed with the counting lesson. I also loved the finding of the polygons towards the end of my day at the Learning Academy. I would have never thought about employing these things in my classroom.