What a great morning I had today!

 

I had a chance to observe in one of the RCSD elementary schools this morning.  It is a special Saturday morning school program, primarily to prepare for the NYS exams.  Those are over for the year, but they still meet and and work on Math and ELA stuff.  

My first experience observing, in a different school district, I learned more about what not to do in the classroom, so this experience was quite enlightening. 

First we began the morning off with breakfast in the cafeteria.  I had a chance to meet the students and interact with them.  We then moved on to Math, fractions using Hershey Chocolate Bars.  The students were given one whole chocalate bar each.  We started off talking about the candy bar as a whole and made some comparisons to other things as well.  We then divided the candy bar into it’s 12 parts. The students were then asked to divide the parts in half.  We proceeded to divide them into 1/3 1/4, and so forth.  We talked about other ways to say 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 ( 3/12, 4/12, 6/12).  This activity was great becasue it worked with visuals, hands on learners.  Research says most students fit at least one of those two learning styles, if not both.  Plus a bonus was we got to eat chocolate along the way.  A very tasty Math lesson.

We then moved onto “Readers Theatre”.  This was something that I heard about but had never seen done before.  We read through a play in two groups, each students having a part to read.  The first read through was just to get used to the text and work on any difficult words.  The second reading the groups combined to focus on fluency of the reading.  Each student had a part and focused on the voice, puncuation, flow, etc.  The students really got into the presentation of the second reading.  They were having fun reading, which now a days doesn’t seem to happen enough. 

We then finished the day in the computer lab.  We practiced keyboarding, just kidding!  The students were working on completing a “bug rap” they had started in a previous class.  They then moved on to the next project “Magic Touch”.  If they had a magic touch what would objects turn into?  When they were done they would name and save the work and then submit it to their teacher through email.  The teachers would comment and send the work back to them for corrections.  The students really enjoyed the the computers, and it was nice to see they were being used, and had been being used all year.  One thing the teachers could have done better was give directions before they got to the computer lab, it was a little crazy at first but they settled in. 

All day I was able to interact and really help the studetns.  They were so appreciative for the help.  It was so exciting to see what I have been learning being out into action in the classroom.  The principle and teachers were so welcoming, you can tell they really care and have a great learning atmosphere in their school.