Brigham- week 2 in the classroom

This past week at Brigham, I was an aid to Kristie and Katie in the kindergarten room for their lesson.  They taught a lesson on living vs. nonliving things.  My role in their lesson was to take a group of students outside to examine living and nonliving things.  The students were to find a living or nonliving object and tell me what is was.  All of the other groups were participating so well outside, except for mine.  My group ran to the playground and was more interested in playing than finding living and nonliving items.  One student found a rock and said it was living.  Another identified a playhouse and said it was living.  The third student would not talk to me at all.  When the students went back into the classroom, they filled in a chart of living and nonliving things.

Looking back on this lesson, I think Kristie and Katie did a great job of engaging the students.  They were very interested in the video that they showed and extremely excited to go outside.  I think that teaching a lesson to a class you’ve never met is very hard, but Kristie and Katie pulled it off.  Two of the things I found difficult was not knowing the students names and not knowing their attention getters.  It is hard to connect with the students or get their attention if you do not know either of these. 

The goals I have made for myself this semester are to try to learn some words and phrases in the student’s home language, gain overall experience, and include language and differentiation in lesson plans.  I think that I am definitely gaining overall experience.  Being in as many classrooms as possible will definitely give me more experience.  I also like seeing how my peers teach.  I think that we can all learn from each other so it is great that we get to observe their lessons as well.  I also think that I am learning to write more differentiation in my lesson plans.  The past couple lessons and projects I have written have included differentiation for ELL learners and I think that it is slowly, but surely getting easier to do.  My weakness right now is learning words and phrases in the student’s home language.  I think that is a weakness just because I had only been in both the preschool and kindergarten classrooms once.   This is something that I will continue to work towards.

I am glad that I was able to observe in the kindergarten class this week because it gave me a chance to see the student’s faces and their classroom environment before I teach my kindergarten lesson.  Going into the classroom blind is definitely a scary feeling.  When I was writing my kindergarten lesson plan, I felt completely lost because I had no idea what the students were like or how they interact.  I feel more prepared for my lesson and can make changes to my lesson plan based on what I saw in the classroom last week.