My first formal supervisor lesson in kindergarten, I’m not going to lie, was intimidating. I have had experience teaching and I wouldn’t say I get nervous when I teach; however, in this case I was extremely nervous. During lunch I couldn’t stop pacing back and forth because of the nerves that I felt. If I had to guess why I was nervous, I would probably assume it is from my lack of experience with kindergarteners. I haven’t really had much experience being around kindergarteners or teaching them. My CT has given me many tasks that I have successfully completed in the class, but this just seemed different.

My CT wanted me to teach a math lesson, and because I have seen their engagement during read alouds, I knew that I wanted to incorporate one into this lesson. Luckily, I found a good book that followed the standard that I was teaching. When I made my lesson plan, I felt as though I had a pretty solid plan. It wasn’t until after I conferenced, my perspective was opened and I knew I had to add some things in order to see a full picture of my students learning.

Before my teaching, I had thought I had a good plan to have the students sit in a circle and count the students in the class. I would have them stop and then another student would start counting again. When I actually implemented this part of my lesson, I had a little bit of a struggle. I don’t feel as through the students knew what I was asking of them and because there was a student that was being disruptive my mind was racing and I don’t think I was being very clear in what I wanted from them. If I were to teach this lesson to the same students I think I would still keep the read aloud because for the most part they were all fully engaged during it, however I think I would add more choral reading. I think this would help my ELL student make connections and it will also help my below level students with visually linking words with their voices. I would also do something different with the practice time of the lesson. Although the students enjoyed their activity of counting up to 15 from their number and counting down to 1 from their number, the enrichment group got really distracted and I think it may have helped if they had some way to write what they were doing, and I might even increase their challenge level of activity. This would also challenge their writing skills as well, thus diminishing their likelihood of becoming distracted (FEAP 3b) From observations between my lesson and the lessons I’ve watched from my CT, the students normally work in leveled groups. That is they are in group with a high, medium, and low. The students seemed to get more rowdy and distracted much quicker in the groups I had them in than what my teacher does. I’m not sure why this happened, I would still like to explore this concept. I would also cut the time of the activity and have the students come together to discuss what they did in their group since the groups did different things. They could use this time to share their challenges and their successes, which would build the learning community and their confidence. During my lesson I was actually surprised to see two things. The first one was that I felt as though the students really understood the concept I was teaching them. They loved being able to count and hold up their fingers while the snack was counting the mice. They seem to do better with read alouds when they are actively involved with the story. The second was how quickly the students lost interest in the practice activity. When thinking about my lesson, there is one thing that really sticks out in my mind. This event is when I had called up the students groups that they would be working in and was explaining to each group what they would be doing. Kindergarteners need both auditory directions paired with modeling since many of them are not at the level where they can read directions and truly comprehend what to do. Because of this, I had a little bit of wasted time during my leveling group split. Since each group was having a different task with the paper mice according to their level, I had to then explain to each group what they would be doing. I’m not sure how I would solve this challenge so I would like to brainstorm some ideas that would better serve me in the future. Another thing that really stuck out to me was when I was working with my below level students. There was one student that was really resilient to doing the activity, he asked me if he could get water while I was trying to help them, since he wasn’t really paying attention I told him now. Immediately I noticed that he sunk down in his chair looking disappointed. I paused and quickly asked him if he were to get water would he then be able to participate in the activity? He shook his head yes, so I allowed him to go. (there is a water fountain in the room) When he returned, I noticed a spunk in his attitude that wasn’t there previously, he was excited and participating. I was genuinely surprised by what I had experienced, and I think it was a good reminder of being cognizant of your students’ needs. In my class, there is only one ELL student. She has actually gone through kindergarten already, however it was in her native country and in her native language (Spanish), I think it would help if I knew simple commands that she would be able to follow when giving instructions. This will allow her to understand what to do at the same rate as her peers and she wouldn’t be trying to learn what to do from watching her peers (FEAP 3c). The main vocabulary that I wanted the students to learn was counting backwards. During the lesson and even after watching the lesson, I felt that the students understood and made connections to what that vocabulary meant. I even saw one of my below level students enthusiastically saying what I was doing when I said “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4,…”. At this level in many of the students’ academics, they are still relying on pictorial and visual representations of numbers. For this reason, I based my lesson practice on this type of mathematics (FEAP 1c). During my coursework as a pre-service teacher, I have learned about The Daily Five and the explanation and research that supports it. The research about the brain’s ability to focus and concentrate on a task is only 10 minutes give or take a few minutes based on age was truly prevalent and visible in my lesson (Boushey & Moser, 2006). At these kindergarteners developmental level, it isn’t appropriate to ask such strenuous tasks for a long period of time without some sort of change. Knowing this now, next time my tasks will be formatted in short bursts of an activity with whole class discussions put in-between.

 

Resources:

Boushey, G., & Moser, J. (2006). The daily 5: Fostering literacy independence in the elementary grades (2nd ed.). Portland, Me.: Stenhouse.