Like Pulling Teeth

            Every day after recess we have ELD or “Talking Time” from 10:25-10:55.  My CT does the “beginners” group so some of the time I assist her and some of the time I lead the lesson.  The focus is simply on developing students’ understanding of grammar and it also gives them an opportunity to begin using academic language. 

            One of the lessons this week was based around the question of “How many children are in your family?” where students reply “I have ____ children in my family” or “He/She has ______ children in his/her family” which are written on sentence strips for the students.  This seemed simple enough to me and my CT but this lesson was one of those where you literally feel like you are pulling teeth.  Especially because we were trying to get our students to say the questions and answers in order to participate, which is much harder than having them circle an answer or copy something off the board like so much of the rest of school is formatted (especially when your students do not read yet and the sentence strips mean nothing to them).  This lesson basically relies on their memorization of the sentence frames for the question and answer and does not give opportunities to students who are not great at instantly memorizing sentences. 

            My CT concluded that the students were off that day and asked them if they were having a hard time focusing and working to which the students all agreed.  She then switched to playing alphabet bingo and encouraged the students to say “I have the letter ___” or “I do not have the letter ___” after she held up each letter.  This went so much smoother and the students were clearly more interested in this game because they were not as off-task (talking to neighbor, touching neighbor, looking around, playing with clothes/shoes, playing with the rug, etc.).    

            As I thought about it later, I couldn’t help but wonder why we are only using sentence strips in ELD.  I know teachers are trying to distance themselves from reading and writing during ELD because this is the beginners group and the students do not have much of a grasp on English yet, but it also seems a mistake to make everything oral.  If a student didn’t understand what was being said in the question, then they wouldn’t be able to form an answer or might not know how to form an answer even when given a sentence frame.  This is a time when pictures are crucial, either on cheesy flash cards or digitally on the board.  Maybe if students were able to see what they were expected to talk about, they could create their own replies and actually know what they were talking about.  In addition to getting kids talking, ELD is about teaching kids what they are talking about.  I think my 4-morning takeover in December will be a great time for me to implement some new ideas in ELD.  I’ll keep you posted. 

Scribbling

You can see that he traced the capital "G" in green, yellow, and purple, and wrote his own "G" in orange before scribbling.

(the red "g" on the bottom was written by his classmate)

            The past few days, I have seen my student J make great strides towards controlling him impulsive behavior.  After talking it out with Jen during our M.Ed. class last week, I realized that J just needs to scribble.  He did not attend preschool and his mom quickly mentioned on the first day of school that he had some shoulder injury that left him without full control of his right hand causing him to suddenly become a lefty. 

            Every day, we do letter formation with a new letter each day.  The students are supposed to follow along with the teacher on the overhead and trace each letter three times then try the letter themselves.  After tracing a few times, J usually resort to scribbling across his entire paper until there are few white spaces left.  I caught on to this and began standing next to him when I felt like he was going to scribble so I could tell him to wait and not do anything until we moved on to the next letter.  He responded well to this and was able to wait for the group to finish tracing without scribbling/coloring all over his paper however I felt as though I was limiting his expression and actions.

            Then one day I realized: he just needs to scribble, as a lefty.  I always hated in junior high when teachers would have us write our daily journal with our non-dominant hand for some reason because I had no control over what I was doing.  Everything felt so backwards and unnatural and there was almost no way for me to start writing well-formed letters let alone entire paragraphs.  This is what J has been experiencing every day.  Sure, he’s only 4 so it’s not like he has that many years of experience at being a righty under his belt but its still significant that all of a sudden he was forced into becoming a lefty.  He gets very discouraged whenever he feels like he cannot write something and that is the moment when he acts out by throwing things, wandering around the class, talking to his neighbor, scribbling, etc.  He is avoiding failure.  He is avoiding doing something that feels strange to him and also, through scribbling, is practicing his gross motor skills with his left hand which is crucial to do before he can even think about his fine motor skills of writing with a pencil.  So I’m not really sure if I am going to discourage his scribbling or maybe just try and redirect it.  I’ll keep you updated.

"YAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!"

10-1-12

(reading the morning message to the class)

Teacher: "Today we will have P.E. and go to the computer lab!"

Students: YAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (that is not even enough exclamation marks to express their elation)

They then proceeded to applaud, cheer some more, and a few students even turned to their neighbors and gave them a big hug.

I instantly thought, “wow, why can’t this happen for math or language arts or even science?”  And I know that the computer lab part is most likely the part that excited them because on Mondays we say, “Today we will have P.E.” and there is a general groan of disgust.

Clearly, we need to incorporate technology into the classroom.  Or at least some general aspects of technology in school: exciting materials, interaction between students and subject matter, and collaboration between students. The entire purpose behind this class suddenly became clearer to me as I heard my students cheering for a specific subject. 

Classroom Community

           

                              (If I had photoshop I'd change the "mistakes" to be something like "attempts")

            It took me three weeks to notice this but now I cannot stop thinking about it.  This week I noticed that the four students who generally have “behavior problems,” which in Kindergarten means not following directions or sitting still, are the only ones to point out if another student is misbehaving.  For these four students, it is so normal for them to be reprimanded that I feel like they are oftentimes just waiting to be in trouble again, or to point out someone else who should be in trouble.

            We as a school system have trained students to see another person’s failure as our own success, and this is only kindergarten!  Some of these students did not even go to preschool yet they are displaying this mentality that is so common for students to buy into.  I feel like sometimes by always correcting or redirecting these students we as teachers are creating bullies: a teacher picked them on for their behavior, so they pick on other students for their behavior.  Clearly this is not what I want to be doing; in fact one of the things that I look forward to the most/am most apprehensive about is building a community in my own classroom that will eliminate this phenomenon and mentality.  I do not want my students to see another student’s “failure” as their own success.  I do not want there to be so much inherent competition that students are rooting for their peers to fail.  I’d like to believe that despite the individualistic society we live in, it is possible to eliminate this behavior in the classroom.  I just don’t know how I’m going to do it yet…      

Teacher Vs. Facilitator

Humility.

It is often an elusive quality for any human being to possessive (probably even more so for Americans) yet humility is incredibly important for teachers to have.

Every time we told someone we wanted to be a teacher, we were admired for being so “selfless” and “patient” while also being warned that we would be underappreciated.  This was a sentiment that I become so accustomed to that I did not even think about what being a teacher meant to me as a person.  To some, being a teacher means you are going to change the world one kid at a time and help oodles of students over the 30+ years of your career.  This can boost your confidence.  This can make you feel like you are doing something worthwhile and highly regarded.  The problem is, in order to be a successful teacher we need to humble ourselves and realize that the students are more important than we are. 

We are facilitators of learning.  We cannot force students to learn.  We cannot force anyone to do anything for that matter, although we can influence situations to better encourage learning. 

Today, I was reasoning with a student that once she completed her letter tracing worksheet, she could move on to the more fun activity that she was watching the rest of her small group do.  It made perfect sense to me: complete step 1, move on to step 2.  But to her, this didn’t make any sense and she was definitely not “learning” anything at this point except for maybe how long she could push me before I asked my Cooperating Teacher (CT) for assistance. 

Being a teacher does not mean that I transmit all of the things in my mind and the textbook into my students minds because they have minds of their own.  In order to create an environment where my students want and choose to learn, I need to work to humble myself and realize that the thoughts of my students are just as important as my own.  I am not a teacher; I am a learner who hopes to facilitate the learning of 19 kindergarteners.