Last week, I was able to work in a preschool room at Brigham
Elementary. Along with a group of four
other student teachers, we went into the classroom for a half hour and
introduced the students to science and what a scientist is. The first activity we did with the students
was a “get to know you” game. We stood
in a circle with the students, and one by one we said our name and something we
liked. If others in the circle also
liked the thing that was said, they would take a step into the circle; if other
did not like the thing that was said, they remained standing in their
place. After this, we read the students
a story called “What Is Science?”. From
this book the students were able to see that science is the study of so many
things. Putting their new knowledge to
the test, we had the students draw a picture of what they thought portrayed a
scientist. From here, I was in charge of
leading the discussion. This ended up
being more difficult that I thought it would be. Seeing that there were 5 teachers in the
classroom (not including the two regular teachers) and only 11 students, I
think the students were a little overwhelmed and did not want to talk. There were only about two students that were
not shy and shared what they drew. Since
it was so hard to get the students to talk, I read a book about what a
scientist does so the students could gain a little more clarity into the many
things a scientist does. This group
lesson was harder than I imagined. The
fact that there were so many teachers made it overwhelming, even for me. I felt like I could not get as involved as I wanted
to be because there was so much going on.
I also felt lost because the classroom teachers did not give us any kind
of attention getters to use with the kids, and since we did not know their
names well, it was hard to get and keep the students attention.
A couple weeks back I set some goals for myself about
working with English language learners.
I said that I wanted to try to learn some words and phrases in the
students home languages, gain overall experience, and include
language/differentiation in lesson planning.
The action steps I listed to reach my goals were to find out what other
languages the students speak, and get involved in the classroom. So far, from
what I could tell, Spanish was the only additional language spoken in the
preschool classroom. One thing that
could help me connect with all students would be to learn their attention
getters or to introduce a bilingual song or attention getter that all students
can participate in. For example, in my
preschool clinical placement last year, I was in a bilingual classroom. During circle time the children sang various
songs about the weather and what day of the week it is. They would first sing the song in English and
then repeat the song in Spanish. This is
something that I would ideally implement in a bilingual classroom. Going even further, I would incorporate
American Sign Language into the song.
This way, the students are learning what small words and phrases are in
ASL and can use them in the classroom.
If all students are learning ASL, it would become the universal language
of the classroom.
This video is a perfect example of a circle time song, sang
in both English and Spanish while using ASL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbH26L7LGY
Exceeds: I wrote
almost 600 words and included a link to a video.
