PDS Reflection

    My experience at my PDS has been wonderful and I have definitely built a good relationship with my first graders. This has been a really good learning opportunity for me in many ways. Throughout the semester I have worked with children off to the side, during the lessons, and I have even taught lessons on my own. I learn more information about the students everyday I am there. I am able to understand the similarities and differences of most of the children, and understand why the act the way they do sometimes and that there is a deeper meaning to everything.
    I work with six through seven year old and I have found that there is a wide variety range on their learning abilities. Some students are at such a high level and do not usually ever need help, some children need help only sometimes, and some children need constant help and a little push to keep them motivated. I have noticed that there are more male students that struggle with their reading and math skills and when my teacher asks me to tutor them off to the side I have only worked with males. I have definitely taken notice on the different learning styles the children have and I try my best to adapt my teaching, to the best of their learning abilities.
    Student engagement has been my biggest wondering and focus with this classroom. I have observed that the students engagement can be very on and off at points and it is pretty challenging to keep everyones attention for more than a short period of time. My teacher has even said to me that the class this year is more difficult than other years. Disruptive behavior occurs, but the children do not have bad intentions, mostly just wanting to play or talk and receive attention.
    Throughout this semester my teacher has given me a ton of opportunities to work with students by myself one-on-one and also the opportunity to teach the classroom as a whole. The one day I did a corn stalk lesson and it was so much fun to teach the children, I enjoyed it tremendously! I started off with drawing on the white board, I drew a picture of a corn stalk and had them follow along drawing at their seats. We labeled the parts (ex. Corn, roots, leaves..) and I practiced repetition drills to help them practice. After that I read them a story, as they sat on the carpet circled around me, about how corn is picked and made into popcorn. I brought in 5 bags of popcorn and though it would be a good idea to have my teacher make the popcorn while I read the story. After I was done reading the story I passed out a worksheet for them to do independently at their desks about popcorn. It had popcorn pictures and places to label the smell, taste, sound, touch...of popcorn and just as I was asking them to think of the smell the teacher came back and the children were so excited! It also made filling out the worksheet more engaging for them and helped them understand better.
    I have recently had academic improvement with one of the males I have been tutoring off to the side. Just last week he struggled through his reading and I noticed that when he did not know a word, he would physically get uncomfortable, move around in his chair, fuss with his pencil. After a couple seconds he would just shot out a random word that was way off the word in the book. I started to notice that he would say the same few words each time that he liked to use (like, them, came.) I talked with him and explained that whenever he comes across a word and starts to feel uncomfortable, to relax, have confident, and look at the spelling of the word. Next spell out each letter and then sound them out together. I explained to him that this is a much more efficient, easy way of learning new words. I motivated him and would not give up, no matter how much he wanted me to just tell him the word. I would make him say each letter, then make the sound each letter makes, and then put it together. As he started picking up I would give him high fives and encourage him on how well he was doing. Then this week I worked with him again on a different book and he was showing improvement immediately and was still using the technique that I taught him!
    It was a really good feeling to know that I helped him with his reading. I have made a lot of relationships with mostly all of the children and they are just so adorable.

    My question to you Emily would be: In your pre- k classroom do you have trouble with disruptive behavior and student engagement at such a young age? What did you observe about their learning and what techniques did you do to improve the results?

Blogging Possibilities

I believe that blogging is beneficial to our program in positive ways of organization.  It is beneficial to keep in contact with the main advisers of our program and also other tutors in our graduating class. I think blogs are very interesting that you can type a post and it will send to all the mail recipients that you need. It is engaging to keep in touch and organize and information that needs to be shared. Also the best thing about blogs are that they can be very informative of any information that I will need to share with others, or others will need to share with me. Blogs are great for the Benedum Collaborative Five- Year Teacher Education Program for everyone to be able to reach each other and keep all the information organized in one place. Also it is beneficial because you can view old blogs which will help us in the future if we need to pull up old information. I envision my blog to support my experiences with keeping everything organized and receiving  comments back from our main advisers of our program, and also my classmates. I imagine that I will be writing about my experiences in the classroom (my PDS) and my thoughts about them. Also I will provably write about how I dealt with my experiences or any certain situations that I came across. I might also give feedback about my certain PDS teacher and the certain children at the PDS for that semester. I could definitely imagine writing about how these experiences will benefit me as a teacher in the future and ways that I can incorporate what I learned to my teaching techniques.