// Rainforests and Sloths \\

After completing the majority of the year with my students I had a pretty solid understanding of how to teach them effectively. I felt confident in my abilities to teach because I have seen them progress so much already. For this lesson, I decided to focus on a social studies lesson that integrated a science topic. The social studies standards in kindergarten are a short list, thus the kindergarten team at my school have a set themed schedule that they follow from year to year. This week the theme was the rainforest. For the entire week we focus on the various animals, layers, plants, and characteristics of the rainforest. The particular lesson that I taught for my observation was on the sloth. I used a couple of teaching methods within this lesson such as a read-aloud, a guided release, and technology. At the kindergarten age, having a structured lesson is beneficial for them because it gives them a sense of industry and competence in which they need to achieve at their developmental stage according to Erikson’s psychosocial stages (1959). After a pre-conference with my CT, she suggested that I focused on the sloth because she had an activity that they would work towards being able to do at the end of the week. Additionally, she said that this was an animal that many children are unfamiliar with so it introduces them to new knowledge.

Teaching this lesson revealed a surprise that I hadn’t expected. When I showed the video of a sloth crossing the street, the amount of excitement and enjoyment that emanated from the students was something that I would like to replicate in lessons to come. I assume that this excitement was because the generation that these students have been raised in has integrated technology almost as a second language in their life. With this in mind, these students learn best with technology because they have been using it since they were born. It is something that comes natural to them, so why not increase using it in the classroom. Originally when I had planned my lesson, I hadn’t planned for the video. However, after reviewing the lesson plan with my CT she suggested using a video she had seen on Facebook recently. She thought that it was a good opportunity for the students to see what a real life sloth acts like. Reading about an animal can only illustrate so much, the video gives the students a chance to see it how slow it’s motion actually is. After post-conferencing with my CT and reflecting on my own, I thought that the structure of my lesson flowed nicely. There were so many different components that kept the students engaged. First they had the read aloud, then we filled out the flip book, then to give the students a break I played the video. When the video finished the students worked independently on their pictures and sentences. According to Boushey and Moser (2014) students brains can only stay attentive and focused for 10 minutes—give or take a few minutes based on age—without some sort of change. Since my lesson was only about forty five minutes, my lesson structure correlated with their studies. A student that I noticed did well with this lesson was my ELL student. When I first began my internship in the class, she didn’t know very much English at all. One day I saw that she checked out a Zootopia book, in which I remembered when it came to me teaching this lesson. One of the characters in the movie and book is a sloth and I knew that making a connection to that character when teaching about the sloth would support her learning and the other students’ learning as well. Now that she is able to express herself better than in the beginning of the year, after the lesson she told me that favorite animal was a sloth. When she told me this, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of joy because I felt as though I made the lesson relatable to her. Going off of this, my ELL accommodations for this lesson included having that visual aid of a video, drawing small pictures by the word or phrase within the flip book, and allowing the students to express their knowledge not only through words, but also through a picture with labeling. This allowed ELL students to display any gap of English knowledge through a picture. Additionally, through my differentiation I was able to pull students back that were struggling with developing their sentences. While they worked with me, I would ask them what sentence they were desiring to say (or give them a short sentence depending on level) and then drawing lines symbolizing each word within the sentence stated. This gave them support and guidance to complete writing their sentences with.

If I had the ability to go back and do things differently or teach this lesson again I would like to increase the differentiation that I had in my lesson. I feel like I could have differentiated the flip book better so that my below level students were able to follow along at a better pace and not get frustrated. I might also want to some how give students an opportunity to choose what type of independent work they wanted to do to show their knowledge. Having a choice would give them that sense of industry I mentioned earlier and it would also be differentiating for the students learning style. Another thing that I would like to explore are the literature about sloths that are available. The book that I used was the only text available at my school library about sloths. The book was an informational text and a little dry for this age of students. I would like to research the literature about sloths to see if there are any engaging and more exciting non-fiction books about them. If I were to teach this again, I would definitively begin my lesson with a Zootopia movie clip of the sloth characters. Then I would maybe create a KWL chart asking the students what we already know about sloths. This would almost serve as my pre-assessment because I would be able to see what information they already know about sloths so I could focus more on new information within the book. The Zootopia video would start them off right by creating that connection and engagement that every teacher desires in a lesson. The KWL chart would give the students a first look of how to structure old learning with new learning. This class graphic organizer also enables the students to stay engaged throughout the read-aloud because they would be able to visually see their learning as they stated it orally. After teaching every lesson there are always things to improve on and new ideas that would be better next time. It’s a learning process that never ends!

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References:

Boushey, G., & Moser, J. (2014). The daily 5: Fostering literacy independence in the elementary grades (2nd ed.). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Erikson, E. H., Paul, I. H., Heider, F., & Gardner, R. W. (1959). Psychological issues (Vol. 1). International Universities Press.

 

// ADAPTING to ELA \\

My experience within my internship has allowed me to fully take over the classroom. Even though I’ve taken over, I’ve only had formal observations in math and science. Because I want to get as much feedback as possible within every aspect of my teaching ability, I chose to have my last formal observation in English Language Arts (ELA). Since the school that I’m at is an ERT school, due to the letter grade they received last year, the lessons that we teach within the classroom has to come straight from–or pretty close to–the curriculum guide given by the district. This ELA lesson was structured by the book “Red Eyes or Blue Feathers” by Patricia Stockland. This was an informational text in which was being used to reach the goal of identifying the main idea and key terms within the text by using support from the text. The text that was chosen was all about color adaptions that animals do to survive.

During my lesson there were some positives that I could take away, but I do feel as though there could have been a lot of improvements in how the information was presented and taught. Some of the things that I thought went well was the beginning portion when defining the vocabulary. From my perspective, I thought some of the terms were a little challenging for kindergarteners so I had to reword and use guiding questions to support their thinking. According to the standard for this lesson, using support and prompting questions is in line with the student outcome. For example, when defining prey I had to reword a lot to get that they are what predators hunt. Another thing I thought went well was the assessment choices I had given the students. When setting up the choices I initially thought no body would actually chose the acting out form of assessment because it was a new concept introduced to them. However, to my surprise one of my students did choose this option and preformed it flawlessly. She gave what animal she chose (red-eyed tree frog) and she then acted out the adaption while explaining her actions. To me, this showed that although I may have a preconception about my students, they know their ability and what they are good at. Even though introducing something may be challenging at first, giving students options to show their mastery is always worth it.

With every lesson, after reflection, there can always be improvements. In this lesson, I had planned on starting the lesson with a video to engage the students. The video was going to show the students how a chameleon adapts by changing color. However, unfortunately technology got the best of this aspect of my lesson because after ensuring the video worked in the morning, when I turned it on for my lesson, it was blocked. I was a little disappointed about this because I really wanted to show the students how an animal adapts in real life since adaptations is a challenging concept to understand without some sort of visual. While teaching the lesson, I saw how hard it really is to conceptualize because it’s not really a concrete topic, it’s more abstract. According to Piaget (1936), students aren’t in the developmental level to start understanding abstract material until the end of the concrete operational stage (age 7-11).

The teaching method I used in this lesson could have been better in my opinion. As I said I had to follow the curriculum guide, and I’ve noticed many times that their teaching methods are a bit dry. I did incorporate some movement opportunities in the lesson so they weren’t sitting on the carpet the whole time. When playing (or tying to play) the video the students were in their seats. Then the read-aloud took place on the carpet, and when completing their assessment they went back to their seats. This was a connection to my inquiry that I’ve been studying this year about movement transitions and their engagement. The read-aloud that I used had colorful images that kept the students entertained and intrigued. The questions that I asked throughout the book also kept the students involved and actively participating.

A student that I noticed had difficulty during the lesson was one that always likes to raise her hand when I ask questions even when she doesn’t have an answer or know the question for that matter. When I call on her and she doesn’t know the question then she takes a long time answering because she has to think about it. Thus getting the rest of the students distracted and loosing focus because of the extended wait time. The only thing I could do to solve this would be to just reword or repeat the question for her and after 10 seconds of time, tell her I would come back to her.

My next steps after this lesson would be to use a new book and focus on the same standard to see if students could take what they learned and apply it to a new book and topic. This would show me if they have mastered the concept of identifying the main idea and key ideas. I would also plan to explicitly explain to the students how to take information from the text and relate it to supporting their answers. This gives them the foundation of being able to cite text, in which they will need to know as they get older.

To explain the assessment specifically, this is where my differentiation for my variety of learners came into play. This includes students who display their knowledge better by writing, or drawing, or acting out. For ELL students who needed support with language they could have drawn a picture or acted out one of the animal adaptions. After the students were supported with their assessment choice, we all shared what we said so that we could view how each of us learned. The differentiation for the assessment gave the students 3 choices, they could either write two sentences about one of the animals and how it adapts, draw a picture and label an animal adapting to its surrounds, or write what down what animal and its adaption they were going to act out for the class. I will definitely be incorporating these options in my future classroom, because all of the students were then able to feel confident about how they displayed their knowledge.

Inquiry Blog Post 5

Since the last post, there has been two weeks that have transpired. These two weeks have been the beginning of using my new reworked inquiry wondering of: how does movement transitions impact time usage and student engagement in the lessons that follow? From the last post, I was wanting to try different variations within the transitions that occur in my classroom. Within this my first action was to see how using no movement in the transition impacted the engagement of the students verses using movement. Seeing the difference between how no movement influences the students engagement would allow me to compare the data to how their engagement was when using movement. I did this though making observational notes to see how students react. In addition to the notes, I added to my time-engagement chart which would allow me to see the pattern of the time usage in combination with the engagement ratio.  Additionally, I was curious if there was any influence in the way the students reacted during the transitions when different types of activities were used in the lesson. Implementing different activities after the movement transition gave me the ability to observe the influence that it could be having on my data. Observing if there is any difference would allow me to see if the engagement and time usage is truly from the transition.

The implementation of the different after transition activities showed me that although the students were a little more talkative with the activity that wasn’t as hands-on and “exciting”. One of the lessons I had made observational notes in was during a hands-on shape sort. In this lesson, the students were sorting food that was shaped as different 3-D shapes. When the students came in from being outside and were going to the carpet to wait for instruction, they noticed the food on the table and were a little distracted from that. However, once getting to the carpet they perked up and were awaiting me instruction quietly. After my review of 3-D shapes we had been learning about we began the next transition. The transition from the carpet to the tables was quick and quiet. The students were ready to begin the lesson within 1 minute. They were engaged and focused on me to give the next instruction. There weren’t any students that slowed down the transition or didn’t follow directions. I was thinking that this was due to the food activity that they would be doing. However, the following days’ math lessons proved me wrong. The next set of observational notes was on the following day, in which the students were doing a far less exciting math lesson. This lesson was using coloring paired with the math concept of 3-D shapes. On this day, I didn’t have much of a voice so I was a little concerned my expectations wouldn’t be as clear, thus leaving the students in a hectic state of mind when transitioning. When the students came in from being outside, they went straight to the carpet. Unlike the prior day, the students weren’t distracted by anything on their tables when coming into the room. Even though they weren’t as attentive as yesterday and I had to ask two students to clip down this was before I was able to give instruction for the math lesson. Once I had given instruction to get out four of their favorite colors then give me a thumbs up and sent the students on to transitioning to their tables, the total time of the transition took about 2 minutes. This 2 minute time did include a reminder that it doesn’t involve talking. After looking at the two sets of observation notes, I did see a difference in the engagement and time, however, the time difference and the engagement seems like such a minute difference that I don’t think the type of activity after the transition makes that big of a difference in the impact of the engagement and time usage. Knowing this I can focus more on just the transition rather than what the students would be doing after the transition. I won’t be worried about the data I will be collecting on the students engagement and time usage when doing movement transitions being skewed because of this variable. It seems as though the data that I will be collecting is solely due to the transition, which is beneficial for when I go to make claims in my inquiry.

Another set of data that I collected was observation notes of when I used no movement to transition from one activity to the next. This difference was in between lunch and science. During this time we normally transition and move to the carpet to read a book (if time permits) then line up for lunch. In this particular day I still was lacking a voice and decided to just have the students clean their science materials up and return to their seats. Since there was still time, I played a myon book instead of reading one on the carpet. After the book, the students remained in their seats and the lunch helper called the names to line up for lunch. The students were loud and not engaged to the point where my CT had to yell and remind the students the expectations. Normally when we’re on the carpet, the students may move around, but they listen and don’t normally need vocal repercussion. This set of data I think was shows a key factor into understanding my wondering. The difference in the students behavior and their ability to be engaged enough to listen to the lunch helper call names shows that the movement within the transition does impact the students. In this case, the students were antsy to move and get their energy out in one way, which turned to a room full of talkative students disregarding the expectations. This learning was important in my inquiry because it gives me the ability to establish a claim through the collection of more data focusing on this.

The next actions that I will be taking over the next couple of weeks that remain in my internship include collecting more data focusing on the no movement concept that I observed this week. Also I would like to start implementing different “switching activities” that I learned about while researching my wondering topic (Sainato, 1990, p. 290). This strategy consists of requiring the students to complete a task of some sort as a preparation for the next lesson or activity. For example, having the students go to the carpet in between lessons would be considered a switching activity. However, instead of the carpet switching activity, I will be using something inc combination or instead of. After conducting my research, this was one of the actions I was excited to implement because I think I some good claims could derive from them. From the data I have collected, I still wonder what the students will think about the different “switching activities” and using no movement when transitioning. I think this may be the last action that I plan to end with for my inquiry.

References:

Sainato, D. M. (1990). Classroom transitions: Organizing environments to promote independent performance in preschool children with disabilities. Education and Treatment of Children, 13(4), 288-297.

// Finding Shapes in Food \\

While planning this lesson on 3-D shapes, I was excited because I knew I wanted to use a strategy that would engage my students. They had been writing and working in their math books the entire week while learning about 3-D shapes. Instead of using the book, I wanted the kids to use their hands. Especially since their final assessment was coming up and they needed the practice. The strategy I used was using food. This would keep the kids engaged because I used the food as an incentive. If they did their work they would get to eat the food. Additionally, I knew from looking at what would be on their final assessment that they would need to know specific attributes and names of 3-D shapes. This gave me the idea of using a sorting activity with the food.

The day of my lesson, I had planned on starting quickly after coming in from outside time. However, just as in anything, unexpected things can happen. The fire alarm went off just as we were lining up to go inside. Luckily, my CT has set up a pretty structured management system that made this unexpectency go smoothly. When the students came back in, they followed the routine they normally do when coming in from outside. I gave brief time to get water, then began, leaving limited time to get distracted. I started with a brief review so that it would engage the students and start their minds off the right way. Since these students need explicit instruction, I used the rest of the engaging time to tell them the instructions of the activity. This allowed me to express my expectations for the lesson and their behavior.

If I had to teach this lesson again there are a couple of things I would do differently. When doing the shape sort, I would have the students write down or sketch within their Venn diagram. This would allow me to remember their learning and understanding of 3-D shapes as I look back over them. Additionally, this keeps them accountable in the assessment. I would also like to incorporate some moving opportunity into the lesson. I think movement is important in student learning, especially for the younger students. It keeps their minds engaged and active. I’m just not sure how I would use movement in it, this is where I would have to brainstorm. Another thing I’d like to look into doing differently is the type of assessment I did. I’d like to give every student the opportunity to find success, so showing mastery only through writing doesn’t give this opportunity. One assessment I could use is acting out. With acting out through a skit, I’m not sure how they would do this besides a student becoming a “shape character” that explains the attributes of that shape.

Something that surprised me was how well behaved and engaged the students were. They followed directions entirely and I didn’t have to get onto them once. I had expected I had to redirect students at some point to not eat the food. However, with that initial set of expectations that I set in the beginning and the desire to eat all their snacks must have kept their motivation. Towards the beginning of this semester, I had set the goal of becoming better at explaining my directions and expectations because the students within my class had a difficult time with that when I first started. From this lesson, I can see the growth that I have made with my expectation explanation ability. Another thing that surprised me in this lesson was the students who did well. I had a wide variety of students who did really well in this lesson and I really think that’s tied to my differentiation that I used. One of my students who is below level normally gives up pretty early in on a lesson because the content is to fast paced for him. However the sorting worksheet that I made was at the readiness level appropriate for him. This allowed him to follow along and still learn at the same time as the rest of the class. He stayed on task the whole time, even to the end when they were working independently. I also think that working with his hands was another factor that kept his engagement. He is one of those students who needs to have something in front of him to learn. Working in a work book just doesn’t work for him, and that’s okay. It then just becomes the teacher’s job to accommodate for their learning needs. On the opposite end, one of my students who is above level normally gets so bored with a lesson because he knows the content and it doesn’t challenge him. The differentiation that I did on his sorting worksheet required him to follow along and listen to the lesson because he had to fill in things as we went. He wouldn’t be just a present body in the room, he had a task that kept him accountable and engaged throughout. From the amount of student success that I had with this lesson, I would definitely use my differentiated sorting worksheets again.

The connections that I can make to my course work is in my teaching math course. In this course we learned the multiple ways that math content could be taught. They gave examples and explanations as to why math should be taught through more than a work book. They articulated how fully understanding a math concept can be seen when a student is given a problem and is able to apply their learning in another way (Van de Walle, Karp, & Bay-Williams, 2013). For example, since the students had been using their math work book the previous week, they were able to use what they learned in that and apply it to the food shape sort. Anther connection that I made was within my planning instruction class. In our textbook they explained how important the concept of “one size doesn’t fit all” was within education. This quote was the starting point of explaining why differentiation is so essential in the classroom and the difference that it can make. After this lesson and a few other lessons I have taught where I have really differentiated, I completely understand the significance. As I’ve gone through this education program, I have heard the word differentiation so many times, but the impact that it actually has on students justifies the prevalence of the word.

My next steps after this lesson is to give the students their summative final assessment to view their learning and ensure understanding. From the assessment that I used in this lesson, I see that the majority of the students were able to master the concepts that were focused on. The summative assessment is in a much easier format because it is all multiple choice. Knowing that I am confident my students are prepared for the final assessment. After giving the summative assessment, I will then truly be able to see what students got it and what students didn’t. If there are students that might have missed a concept on the summative, I can always pull a small group while my CT is teaching to re-teach and re-establish the material.

The ELL accommodations that I made in this lesson were how I structured my teaching and visual cues. The structure of my lesson was done in the “I Do, We Do, You Do” fashion. I modeled what the students would be doing first, then I did a sort with them as a class, then after I felt the students were competent and understanding the material, I allowed them to work independently. The visual cues were apart of my differentiation on my sorting worksheets. For students who may need more support with the names of the 3-D shapes, I included images of that shape next to the word. This allowed them to match that image with the word and then with the food item.

After completing this lesson I learned that students do well with hands on activities where there are incentives involved. I have used hands on activities before with counters and cubes, however, this lesson went a lot more smoothly than prior ones. I know that when students are engaged and actively learning there are less behavior problems, so knowing how food creates that engagement will guide me as I plan other reviews with students. Review is a significant lesson for any grade because it gives students the ability to apply their knowledge they have been learning about before the test. This lesson has shown me how using food can benefit the students learning within a review.

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Reference:

Van de Walle J.A., Karp, K., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2013). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Inquiry Blog Post 4

 

This week of inquiry, provided me with a chance to revisit my wondering and really establish what I wanted to study. After rewording and reworking my inquiry, I had a new focus for my inquiry. I had always known I wanted to focus on transitions within my class, but my wondering was a little spread out and unrefined leaving me faced with a large study that I didn’t know how to undertake. My new inquiry wondering focuses solely on how the movement of the transition impacts the engagement and time usage in the lesson that follows. I decided to eliminate the table arrangement and classroom setup portion of my inquiry. I came to this decision to rework my inquiry after a collaboration activity with my critical friends group (CFG). Through this we wrote down our wondering and switched them around the group to answer questions. This was in an effort to refine the wonderings within our group Having this opportunity gave me the ability to bring in explanations for any unanswered questions or possible confusions. Even though this wasn’t an action that I implemented in the class, this piece of data collection could potentially be more influential. This data gives me guidance on what data to collect to really view what I’m interested in and is the most influential factor or engagement and time usage. I think that although the tables may be a factor in the transitions, I think that the effect of it is so minute that focusing on just the movement would be much more interesting and show more information to make claims. The students didn’t really have any part in this piece of data collection, but they are the ones that this data will affect because I’ll be studying their reactions of this new wondering. With this new inquiry wondering, one of the actions I researched talked about independent versus group contingencies. I wanted to view how using group versus independent contingencies influence the transition. This would give me the knowledge on which reward system to use consistently use when collection my data, so that I wouldn’t have to many factors that come into play. The best way to show my data for this action, I thought, was through a journal reflection that compared to my two experiences.

The past week I’ve been observing how the students engagement changed between using independent and group contingencies (rewards). The types of rewards that I used were the rewards already established within my classrooms management system. For the independent rewards, I used the clip system. This clip system consists of seven colors. All the students come to everyday on the neutral middle color (green). If they do something notable, such as follow transition routines quickly and quietly. For the group contingencies, we have the table points in which the students only get points if everyone in their group are on task and following directions. From my trial this week, I rewarded individual students (to clip up) if they were on the carpet quickly and they were sitting in their spot with their hands in their lap and sitting quietly, ready to move on. When I did this the students seemed to follow suit more quickly and came to await the next thing (or to see if they would clip up too). The group contingency of table points seemed to have a different outcome. Although the students wanted the points, there wasn’t any difference in the whole class engagement level. The students’ self-motivation seemed to over ride the motivation that derives from a group to be engaged. After moving to the carpet after completing math, I would explain the next subjects information and directions. Then I would tell students to tip-toe to their tables. I would have informed students prior to their release to give me a thumbs up when they were ready (my engagement sign). The time-engagement ratio of the students were higher on the days when I used the individual clip system. Thus, more students were engaged in less amount of time. This relates to my inquiry because this independent variables could have impacted my inquiry of understanding how the movement alone influenced and impacts the lesson. Now understanding that the individual contingencies reap a better time-engagement ratio, I will keep that aspect fixed so that I am able to get a true study on the movement rather than the reward. My next steps will involve making a lot of observations and adding to my time/engagement chart when implementing the action of having movement to the carpet verses not moving to the carpet for transitions. I want to view if that time/engagement ratio will differ and in what ways they will differ. Additionally within this I’m curious to see if there are certain students who might respond better to no movement verses movement.

The most powerful form of formative data I collected this week was the journal reflection. I think this is because as I continue on my inquiry, I am able to get a true reading of how movement only impacts the students’ engagement and time usage. This week I learned that wonderings can change through inquiry and that’s perfectly okay. This shows that your learning and being a reflective educator. Additionally in relation to my students, I learned that they respond better to independent rewards when transitioning. I know now to reward independently when I plan on collecting data. I believe that my Critical Friends Group was important to my inquiry because I have a new founded guidance that will keep me more focused as I collect data. My data won’t seem as scattered so as I go to analyze and present my inquiry I will have viable clams that support what I have been doing. This data supports my inquiry because it shows I am flexible and reflective as a researcher. It shows that I’m open-minded and able to take other people’s perspectives into account. This is important when researching because you don’t want your data, claims, or actions to be biased. The data I collected for the independent verses group contingencies support my learning because “the students self-motivation seemed to override the motivation that derives from a group to be engaged” (journal reflection). This data allows me to keep things consistent and fixed so that I can limit the factors that could focus on the outcome and limit the remaining questions related to the factors. the actions that I think I will take next week include looking at if the engagement changes based on the activity that follows. I will use the same transitions during the same time of day, but I will just use different activities. This will show me if the movement of the transition is the true factor of engagement or if it was the activity. Another thing I’d like to look at is using different movements during transitions to see the effect and impact of the engagement and time usage. This data I will probably study into the next week as well because this is a main data point of my inquiry. Based on the data I have collected, I still wonder if thee are any other factor that influence my results. Although I can’t five everything in a study, I’d like to get the truest reading as possible. Engagement is a tricky thing to study because of all the possible influential factors that could come into play.

Wondering before CFG

Wondering after CFG

Table Points

Clip Management System

 

Inquiry Blog Post 3

As I study the transition management system within my CT’s classroom, I have been collecting data in various different ways to see how influential the rug transition and having tables are on the time to transition from one activity to the next. Last week, I was able to collect data through a video and the observational notes of my supervisor. Although these gave me a good insight into my inquiry, I decided that I wanted to include my students’ perspective as well. I thought, what better way to understand the carpet transition then to ask the students who are doing it? The questions that I asked my student were phrased in a format that a kindergartener would be able to respond to. I didn’t want to over question and confuse my student, otherwise I wouldn’t really get their true thoughts because they wouldn’t know what I was asking. I included in image of the the interview below:

Although there were a few answers that strayed from the question I was asking, I think the key answer that really sparked an interest for me was the first response: “because you can rest”. This response got me thinking, “is there research that shows movement from one location to another benefits learning?” This piece of data actually guided me into my next data collection because I wanted to learn more about this question.

From a prior course, I remember that the book The Daily 5 did a lot of research on how the brain worked and why they designed their center structure the way they did. I figured since I already had the resource, I would look back into it and see if there was anything about this movement/rest idea. After going through and skimming the text book, I found a section that talked specifically about their transitions with their center time. Although this piece of literature focused on a center time schedule, it did provide me with a great information that supported and explained my students response. Having transitions that include movement according to Boushey and Moser (2014), “allow for a longer and more focused literacy time” (p. 33). Using the carpet as the movement opportunity provides students with that physical and kinesthetic break that Boushey and Moser (2014) suggest gives the brain a chance to refocus–i.e. a time to “rest”. Letting students have a chance to refocus with a break allows students to regain their attention span that will allow for more authentic academic learning time. Additionally they also say that “the simple act of putting their things away and walking back to join together provides the physical break children’s bodies and minds need” (p. 32) This quote made me think about the age of the students that I have in my class. I have to remember that these students are only five or six years old, for them to sit in one spot all day long is not developmentally appropriate. I think that this week’s data collection gave me a great new perspective that I could test through looking at the difference in the students’ engagement after movement to the carpet verses no movement to the carpet. I can also test to see how the length of the break affects the smoothness and engagement level into the next activity. Another thing I could test from learning about this movement/rest theory is the difference in the carpet transition verses a different movement transition that doesn’t require the carpet. Does having the ability to “join together” as Boushey and Moser describe make a difference? There are a lot of next steps that I can take as I continue on this inquiry journey next week.

Reference:

Boushey, G., & Moser, J. (2014). The daily 5: Fostering literacy independence in the elementary grades (2nd ed.). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Inquiry Blog Post 2

From the prior week of data collection, I had collected a reflective journal of my experience implementing the transition strategies to my class. Even though a reflective journal is valuable data, you can miss some important information because you are unable to see everything that is going on at every moment while teaching. Since I want to see how the students react and what they do during the transition I thought that the best action to take was to collect data through a video. This will record not only time of the transition, but it will also allow me to view what may be affecting the time and analyze how it is affecting the time.

After the data collection that I had made last week, my next decision was to take a video of the students during an entire transition period so that I could truly see what each student does during the transition. I took the video in the morning during the students’ center time. Since I can’t post the video due to confidentially and privacy, I can explain how the transition is structured. When my CT finishes in small group she tells the students to “alright everyone, clean up”. With that cue, the students rush to either put their book boxes on the self (if their read to self or read to someone), put their cards, worksheets, stories, or sight word papers in their cubbies (if your work on writing or word work), clean up all the materials from the word work buckets and place them back on the shelf (if their word work), or they just go to the carpet if they were working with the teacher. There are a lot of things going on during this “clean up” time, but the students are walking—some even scurrying—to do their practiced transition. Once students sit in their designated square on the carpet, they are supposed to await the teacher to come and send them on their next center. The video showed that some students were talking while on the carpet, not fully engaged and waiting quietly. My CT didn’t say anything to them until she got in front of them. There were some stragglers getting to the carpet as well who were making sure the room and tables were clean and organized. Even with the stragglers, my CT started to refocus the students to transition into their next center. I stopped the video while she was talking to the students about who would be reading with who, (according to the cards they placed prior to beginning centers) since I wanted to focus on the movement and the engagement right after the transition. When she was sending the students on their way for center number two, I began the video again so that I could see not only the transition to the carpet but also the transition from the carpet to the next activity. I did this so I could see the full extent of the carpet transition. It isn’t just a transition that is a one step process, it essentially is three steps: getting to the carpet, refocusing, and leaving the carpet.

From what I saw in the video, the students were a little more distracted than usual, I’m not sure if this was due to me recording or if it was just a fluke. The content that I recorded lasted for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. This includes getting to the carpet portion and leaving the carpet portion. The majority of the time in the beginning did come from my teacher cleaning and coming to the carpet as well. Thus it wasn’t just the students being inattentive and not following directions. For kindergarten, I feel as though this time is quick because they are so young and they are having to do a lot before getting to the carpet. They aren’t just moving straight there, they have to clean up. This piece of data allowed me to get a better visual on the students’ engagement, movement, and time during the carpet transition. I would like to collect a couple more videos of their transitions but vary the time of day and the reason for transitioning.

The other piece of data that I collected were observational notes made by my supervisor. Since I was going to be teaching a lesson, I figured having an outsider observe the transitions during my lesson would provide me with insight into my inquiry. In my lesson I read the students a book on the carpet and then informed them that we would be doing an activity at their seats. From the notes, my supervisor mentioned that the transition from the carpet to the tables was under one minute, which is very quick. He added that might also have been influenced by the students excitement to get to their tables to start the activity. After the activity, instead of going to the carpet, I told the students just to get out their yellow science notebooks and a pencil. I informed them that when they had done this and they were ready to give me a thumbs up. My supervisor noted that I did use a reward incentive when I did this because I told a couple students who were ready first to go clip up (the reward/punishment system within the class). This could have also influenced the time of the transition. Even without the carpet transition in this portion of the lesson, the students still managed to transition quickly which makes me think that there might be more to the carpet transition than just having movement. I think that my next step is making this observations and videos of how the incentives within the carpet transition influences the time as well. Additionally, I think that having student input is always beneficial for any type of research that is being held in a classroom, so I plan on getting one of the student’s views on the transition to the carpet. Their information and opinion may give me a new perspective on the transition that I hadn’t thought of or realized.

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// Stuffed Animal Habitats \\

When I saw that the next topic we would be teaching in social studies was habitats, I initially thought about the time training that I attended for my teaching science course. This training was called Project WILD and they talked all about how to incorporate environmental topics and content into the classroom. In part of the training they had each of us take a stuffed animal and we used them in various different activities. One of the activities was a sorting activity that required the students to move in the appropriate category that their animal belonged to. After being introduced to that activity, I thought that using stuffed animals in class would be a great idea to increase student excitement and engagement. There’s something about stuffed animals that almost every student loves, especially kindergarteners.

This lesson that I taught consisted of a read-aloud of a DRA book and then having the students write about the habitat of an animal that is given to them. This writing needed to include key facts such as where they live, what food they eat, what their home may look like, what climate they live in, etc. When reading the book the students were able to see that although animals may be different, there are a lot of animals that have similar habitats. The standard that I used in my lesson was seeing that some animals have similar habitats, which is one of the reasons I did jump on using the DRA book. It was leveled appropriately with sight words and pictures of the animals that they were talking about on each page. Originally, when I first began thinking about my lesson, I was just going to pick a book about habitats, but there weren’t any general books about habitats in the library. Therefore, my CT suggested using a DRA book instead. The students did like the book, but I may have liked to see what books were available through the technology sight Myon. Something that went well in my lesson was the engagement during the writing. Most of the time, during writing, the students will either sit unsure of what to write or they write a sentence or two and say they are done. In this lesson, the students were engaged with their writing until I told them they would begin packing up. I thought this was definitely a success because it shows me that these students are fully capable of being independent writers and learners, even at their age. They do have the stamina to write, as long as they are interested in what they are writing about. Along with the stamina and engagement they had, the students also were able to expand their sentences and their words in a much larger manner than what they normally do.

Even though I am pleased with the way this lesson went, there are always things that can be changed or improved on. For example, if I had time in my lesson, I would have liked to do a rotation type thing where the students moved to a new animals. This would allow them to write about more than just one animals habitat. Additionally, another thing I would change is what I hadn’t planned on. I was planning on having the students write on a pre-lined sheet of paper where there would be room at the top to draw a picture of the animal in the habitat. Instead of using the paper, I just had the students write it in their social studies notebook. I would have liked to use this to maybe hang up in the classroom, because of their excellent work.

Something that was surprising in the lesson was before beginning the writing I gave explicit directions NOT to play with the stuffed animals. However, I thought I would still have to remind at least one student to to play with the animals. To my surprise, the entire time I didn’t have to get onto any students. I guess I’m getting better at my directional skills. This was one of the goals that I needed to work on because of my unfamiliarity with having to be so explicit. To my surprise, there was a student that did especially well with this lesson. This student is definitely a gifted student that gets bored with certain things we do in class very easily. This boredom then leads to him misbehaving. However, this lesson really kept him engaged the whole time and he wrote a lot, where normally he’ll write one or two sentences then say he’s done. This must have been an interest of his which could explain his engagement and motivation. Another student that did well is normally unsure of what to write during writing time. In this lesson, she went right to work and even drew an excellent picture to support her writing.

My next steps from here is to see what they understand about the basic idea of a habitat. If they did then I would move on to teaching regions thus allowing them to move from big idea to specific, which is much more developmentally appropriate for their age.

// A Kindergartener class can be like Day and Night \\

As this semester as gone on, my CT has pretty much given me the reigns on teaching science and social studies. Most days I teach various other small reading lessons throughout the day and even math as well. We have a very co-teach type of classroom relationship and I think we are both very comfortable with this situation. Even though I have been teaching science now for a while, I haven’t had a formal observation of me teaching science. Since I wanted to get feedback on me teaching as many subjects as possible I decided to sign up for a science observation.

In kindergarten, one topic is often taught for an extended amount of time. I assume this is to build those students foundational prior knowledge because this is the first year of formal schooling. In my teaching science course I learned how important it is to address student misconceptions early on so that they don’t face these at a later date. The misconception that was important to teach in this lesson was that you can only see the moon at night. Throughout teaching this topic we have addressed this, but I made sure to explicitly teach and show them this again so that they don’t have this misconception as they get older. The lesson that I taught was the second to last day that they would be one the topic of day and night. That being said, they have been on this topic for about a week and a half at this point. Since many of the students were pretty familiar with the concept I wanted to do something they hadn’t really done before. I was planning on making a class Venn diagram and then they would have to use that diagram to write about either day or night. However, the day before they had used pictures they made to compare day and night in their writing. Therefore, I didn’t want to be repetitive and have them write sentences again saying the same thing. I thought why not have the students show their knowledge in a different format, an individual Venn diagram. This was something that I hadn’t planned to do, but that’s how teaching goes sometimes. You have to be flexible and plan according to your students, even if that’s changing your plan last minute.

The beginning of my lesson started with a read aloud non-fiction text of day and night. I’m not really sure if it was because the book was boring to them or if it was because there was a stranger in the room, but my students were acting much different than usual during this time. Normally, the students are pretty well engaged in my reading and respond to my questioning well. In this case, one of my students started crying and getting upset, another kept messing with my rocking chair, and it seemed like the majority of the kids were really off topic when I was asking questions. This instance was something that didn’t go as planned. Instead of answering the question, they would tell me “I just wanted to tell you…” then go off on a tangent. Normally, I would tell them they could tell me that later if it didn’t answer the question, but to be honest I didn’t want to get counted off for not allowing a student to speak so I sat through it. I think this may have been because the text was a little boring for them. Next time, I would consider using a myon book to capture their interest through technology with the read-aloud. With the student that kept messing with my chair, I would have had her clip down after the second time of telling her to stop, but again I didn’t want to get counted off for negative punishment. The thing that surprised me was also something that obviously you can never plan for. One of my students started crying, during the read aloud and I didn’t know why. After I was talking with my CT about it, she told me that he had wanted to get water and she told him no so he got really upset and started to cry. When I saw that he was crying during the lesson, I was unsure of how to handle it, so I just ignored it and hoped he would stop. I’m not the best with emotions, so I didn’t know if pointing it out and asking if he was okay would have made it worse or not.

Even though the lesson started off a little rough, I did feel like there were a lot of positives from it. The picture and audio recognition activity that I did with the kids after the read aloud went a lot smoother than the book. I had the students make a sleeping motion with their hands if they saw a picture or heard a sound that was night. If it was a day image or audio, then the students would put both their hands in the air. I think it went so well because it combined fun with motion, whereas the read-aloud may have been a little boring for them because of the content and wording. Additionally, another thing that went well was the Venn diagram. This was the first time that the students did it on their own. Normally, we complete the whole Venn diagram as a class, but since this was one of the last days of teaching night and day, I figured that they had sufficient knowledge about the topic to do it on their own. Almost all of the students filled in their entire Venn diagram with key words that described something they see or do.

There was a student who did well in this lesson with completing the Venn diagram and doing the recognition activity. This student had been struggling with writing her letters together when it’s one word and using spaces between words. You could clearly see her words in the Venn diagram, along with pictures that she drew of them. For differentiation for my struggling students, I used the strategy and lesson structure that my CT and I normally do for writing practice. We normally switch off supporting these students by pulling them back in a small group. Since I was teaching the lesson, she pulled some back and gave them support while completing the Venn diagram. The accommodations I gave for my ELL students was the use of the picture/audio activity. This gave the students the ability to show their knowledge through motion rather than words. According to Edwards, McLaren, Mckeever, Ruddick, and Zabjek “Recent cognitive neuroscientific evidence indicates that movement and gesture are also necessary for optimal cognitive and communicative development” (2011). This is an important piece of literature to remember when teaching kindergarten because they are such young learners and need that movement. Additionally, before the students independently made the Venn diagrams, I modeled how to fill in the graphic organizer appropriately. While modeling the Venn diagram, I drew pictures of the words and sounded out the words as I wrote the letters.

From the prior lessons I’ve done with the students, I’ve sen they were fully capable of knowing that “I can see the sun during the day”, but I wanted to be able to have them combine what they see and what they do during the day and night. Also having the middle portion in the Venn diagram challenges them to think at a more abstract higher level because they are comparing rather than just telling the difference.

Since this was the final day of teaching day and night, and the students did well I would like to do a final assessment to verify that moving to the next concept is best for the students. If after doing this final assessment, and I saw that the students were competent in this section then I would move to the next chapter that covers the constellations and the moon. However, if I saw that a lot of them still had misconceptions and a weak foundational knowledge about the topic, then I would spend an extra day or two teaching day and night in a different way to try and build their learning. This topic is necessary to understand before moving to the next sections, so this is a vital next step that I won’t over look.

References

Edwards, G., McLaren, C., McKeever, P., Ruddick, S., & Zabjek, K. (2011). Kindergarten kids in motion: Rethinking inclusive classroom for optimal learning. Educational & Child Psycology, 28(1), 100-113. Retrieved February 3, 2017.