I never would have imagined that I would be teaching in a kindergarten class two years, even one year ago. That being said, my second formal lesson didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked it to have gone. I taught a social studies lesson that was focused on community helpers. My objective was that the students would be able to identify what tools certain community helpers used and what they did for the community. Since I had started my previous lesson with a read aloud and it went well, I thought I would do the same thing for this lesson. I’m not sure why, but this time the students were really rowdy when I was trying to start the lesson. I think that if I would have been more stern it may have helped this case. The chaos that started the lesson made me feel a little anxious and I never really felt relaxed because I didn’t want to loose control of the students. I think that I have a fear of telling one of the students to clip down because I have a vivid negative memory towards this, and I just feel that there has to be a better way then telling a student to clip down in order to behave. Not only did my read aloud not go as expected, my oral explicit directions that I was going to give the students didn’t go as expected either. When I was telling the students what we would be doing, I don’t think I was explicit enough. That was even something that my CT mentioned to me during my post conference. She said that she can tell that I am used to working with older students because for this age of kids its extremely important to remember to be very clear and to repeat yourself. These students don’t process information as quickly as a fifth grader and they need every detail of directions told to them in an explicit and clear way. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would do many things differently. First I would make sure to explain to the students that there will be one book at each table and you will work together at your table to find the tools that are within the book. I would also make sure that they understand they will only be focusing on drawing tools for the one community helper that your book is about because afterwards we will come together and share what each table had. If I had the resources I would have actually liked students to be able to manipulate and see the tools that some of the community helpers use so that they are able to visualize and clearly link a tangible tool with a community helper. At this age I think that having this type of activity would have been appropriate and it would also support English language learners because they are able to have that tangible visual to link to word meaning. Additionally, if I had the resources and if I was the classroom teacher, I would have liked to invite community helpers in the classroom to talk to the students. Having speakers there would allow the students to ask them questions and their excitement and engagement would have been very high because there is a visitor. Direct changes that I would make to this lesson that I would have control over, would be utilizing the classroom helper: teacher assistant. This job is in charge of helping the teacher pass out papers and I think this would have been useful instead of me having to do this and call the students to their tables. It would have decreased my anxiety and stress because I would be able to focus my control on the students rather than multi-tasking. I did like how before the story I connected to their jobs within the classroom, however I think that they got a little distracted from this point I was trying to make because they were mainly concerned with just telling me all of the jobs. Another thing that I liked was when I had the students gives me thumbs up during the read aloud. While I was reading there were a few students who were disengaged, but when I did the thumbs up and involved them their attention was gained. Next time, I would like to do more of this type of involvement during a read-aloud. A particular instance that comes to my mind after watching my lesson was when I asked the students, “How many firetrucks do you see?”. I asked this question before I set the expectation as to how they should answer it. Again, I think I take for granted that they know how to answer a question because they all shouted out 3 before I get out, “raise your hand”. A positive from this is that most of the students did answer and they were enthusiastic to answer. That being said, does it matter if I had students raise their hand or not? Is raising your hand for everything just a social norm? This event makes me reflect and really think about how I want my classroom to work. What should the norms be? Should it be so structured that the fun is taken out of school? All of these questions also are correlated to what I am learning about in Creating and Differentiating Learning. We have been discussing norms, procedures, and rules that are within a classroom, and I think that this topic might be one that I would ask the students about. I’d like to get their opinion about it since they will be the ones required to do it. I’ve learned that student involvement is important in making norms and rules because then the students are more likely to follow then and they are also learning morality (DeVries & Zan, 2003).

After reflecting a little bit I just think that if the lesson was a little more interactive the management would have been better and it would have been clear that the students grasped the concept. The few times that I did involve the students, they were fully engaged and they were excited. It was when I put the focus back on a teacher centered classroom that I lost some of the students. Another claim that I can make is that these students need explicit instruction followed by repetition. When they have this type of instruction of directions then they are able to fully function independently. It’s when I don’t set every expectation that I am looking for when they are confused and a little chaotic. Overall, I think that the lesson was a good idea because after the read aloud, it was more based on student discovery learning and that is what I love basing my lessons off of. Having the picture books made it a little bit more friendly to English language learners, however, I should have had some sort of way to tell her what we were to draw. It may have been beneficial to model one of the community helpers first before the students began. My CT even made that suggestion in our post conference. I could have modeled the firefighter because I had just read it to the class. Doing this would have not only cleared up any confusion as to what they were doing, but it would have also given the English language learners a visual as to what we were doing. They would have been able to link the images as what that community helper uses. I am so curious of how kindergarteners would do with a video. I could have shown a video of community helpers because as I was planning the lesson I saw many resourceful videos on the topic. I think that they would be enjoy a video, as long as it was short enough to keep their attention in line with their developmental ability. Overall, I think that the lesson just needed a little bit more explicit expectation and instruction and more student involvement.

Resources:

DeVries, R., & Zan, B. (2003, September). When children make rules. Educational Leadership, 64-67.