Recycling Lesson at Brigham

Last Thursday I was in the Kindergarten classroom again, but this time I wasn't teaching my own lesson, instead, I was an extra teacher in the room while Lisa and Amanda taught. Their lesson was on recycling, and I think it went smoothly overall. Being an extra teacher, I just sat back and took notes on one student and how she responded to the lesson. This particular student was very engaged during the lesson and was always raising her hand to answer questions. She spoke in English every time she answered and seemed to understand what the teachers were saying as they spoke in English. I think it really helped during their lesson that they had the visuals for the students to actually see. These visuals were especially helpful for these students because not all of them might have the understanding of the language to get it without the visuals. It was helpful as the students were working on their picture sorts to actually see the objects there. The word aluminum really confused a lot of students and they had a harder time grasping that category. I think Lisa and Amanda did a great job of explaining it and even had a visual for them, but it’s just a hard word that any kindergartener would get mixed up on, especially ones that are bilingual.

I am still working towards my goal that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester. These goals are: 1) Help the students learn in the best way for them, 2) Gain experience working with English Language Learners, and 3) Gain confidence when working with English Language Learners. I am definitely gaining experience and confidence working with English Language Learners every week we are at Brigham for science. I am also getting this experience during my clinical time at Brigham. Because the bilingual kindergarten classroom is right next to my classroom and Mrs. Silva and my CT are friends, I am with this class quite a bit. Every time I am with them, I am thinking of ways to interact with them and get to know them. This experience has been so helpful for me, because I really haven’t had much interaction with English Language Learners before this. I think it is great that Mrs. Silva can fluently speak Spanish and that she incorporates this into her teaching. She prints nearly everything that is hanging up in her classroom or that is going home with the students in both English and in Spanish. She also reads stories to them in Spanish. It is wonderful that she is able to incorporate their native language in her teaching.

The language barrier is definitely there for some of these students, but it is so important to push past it and to help these students learn in the best way for them. The other day, Mrs. Silva was telling me that one of her students, who is one of the smartest in her class and is bilingual, was considered low and at-risk the year before. After looking more into it, they realized that he actually was not low, but they thought he was because they were testing him in English, and not Spanish. Because they did not test him in his native language they thought he was lower than he actually was.

EXCEEDS: I made a connection to my clinical placement. 

Living/Nonliving Lesson at Brigham

This last Thursday, Kristie and I implemented our Living/Nonliving Lesson at Brigham in the kindergarten classroom. I think overall the lesson went well, but it is always good to reflect on your teaching to make it better for next time. First of all, I wish that we had an opportunity to be in the kindergarten classroom before we actually gave our lesson. I felt like it was a little awkward going in there for the first time and teaching this lesson when the students had no idea who we were. This also would have helped us become accustomed to the classroom and help us get to know the students’ names. We were not able to call on the students by name, and had to point to them to have them answer. I think it was a little strange that we went to do the get to know you games, we did it in the preschool classroom instead of the kindergarten classroom, because I really needed to get to know the kindergarteners more than the preschoolers. I think if I had more opportunity to get to know the students, it would have gone better.

Regardless, I still think the lesson ran smoothly, given the circumstances. The students were engaged from the start, which was definitely helpful. When we first started the lesson, they did not know what it meant to be living or nonliving. We showed them the cookie monster living/nonliving clip, and I think the students enjoyed it. They laughed along with it, and afterwards were able to tell us that something needs to breathe, eat, and grow, in order to be living. After we went over the clip, we divided the class into five groups and took them outside. When we made our predictions outside, I was surprised to see many of them make correct predications. It was nice to see that they had actually learned something from the clip, but there were still a few students who still did not know. From this, we could tell that we needed to cover this again for those students. When we took them inside, we had our anchor chart hanging up, and we went over what was on that. There were several columns, item, Need air?, Need food?, Move?, Grow?, and Living? We put the sticky note with the item and prediction under the item column. We them went through each column to see if the item was living or nonliving. This part seemed to confuse the students a little. The first item we put up was a leaf, and we asked the questions in each column, which seemed to be very hard for the students to grasp. They didn’t really have the background knowledge that trees/leaves need air and food in order to survive. So we had to explain to them that although it doesn’t seem like they need these things, they actually do. After the first few examples of this, though, they seemed to grasp it more. If I were to do this lesson over again, I would have started with a less confusing item, like an animal. This way, it would more concrete and easier for them to understand. Although, it was harder to explain at first, and we had a bit of a rough start with that, I think the students started to get it by the end of the lesson. I think the lesson really helped the students see why it was living or nonliving, and helped them visualize it, especially for the visual learners and English Language Learners. I think going outside, and using the students’ responses for this portion really helped engage the students, and give them some pride in their answers.

As I was implementing my lesson, I worked towards attaining my goal of working with ELL students better, and helping them learn in the best way possible for them. Since it was my first time being in that classroom, there were a few things I noticed about it. I noticed that everything in the classroom was both in English and in Spanish, which I thought was awesome for those students who might need one or the other. I wish that we had maybe translated our anchor chart into Spanish as well, to help the students who might need that Spanish. If I were to do this lesson over, I would definitely do this, although, I think it was fine for most of the students. I think it was easier working towards this goal as the teacher of the classroom because it really helped me get a feel for what it would be like to work with these students. All of the students in my group spoke at least some English, but there was one boy who I don’t think spoke the best English. When I asked him to pick an object that he saw, he said “music” and when I asked him again to pick something that he saw, he said the same thing. I don’t know if he picked that because he didn’t really know what else to say, or if he really just wanted to say music. I think that maybe if I had asked him in Spanish, and expected a Spanish response from him, then maybe I would have gotten a better response from him. In my future classroom, I plan on being very accommodating for my ELL students. I think the experience I get from being in this bilingual classroom this year will be very helpful, especially since I don’t have much prior experience working with these students. I look forward to spending more time in this classroom and gaining more experience. I also look forward to observing the other teachers in our class implement their lessons, to see how they do and how they accommodate these students. I think it was also helpful for these teachers to see how we implemented our lesson, so that they could learn from it, and plan their lessons accordingly.

Additional Living/Nonliving Resources

http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/Science-Stories/Earthworms/Living-or-non-living

http://schoolmediainteractive.com/view/object/clip/7ABC07018B522E94840BA8ABAC521D31

EXCEEDS: Included additional resources in Living/Nonliving.