• Professional Goal – Kindergarten

My professional goal this week is to develop a stronger classroom management specifically within class discussions. I am in a kindergarten classroom, the students not only have a small attention span, but they also get excited and off topic quite easily. My plan is to become more aware of the way that I am explaining our activities and topics, more awareness can help me avoid any unnecessary distractions for the students.

  • Steps to Achieve Goal
  • Implement a thoughtful classroom management/engagement plan
  • Talk to class about raising their hand before contributing to the discussion, this helps limit the student to student distractions. 
  • Make it clear to the students that they will all have the opportunity to share their thoughts.
  • Show the importance of listening to all peers and their thoughts by modelling it myself when the students speak, clearly creating a quiet and respectful discussion setting.
  • Focus more on the topic itself rather than the need to relate it to the students, I will ensure my plan itself is relatable, I don’t need to spend a lot of my time giving examples and potentially getting off track

  • Reflection

The second lesson that I taught had ended with a group discussion, I asked a lot of straight forward questions, but I let the students take turns answering. Although the students all raised their hands and didn’t speak until I called on them, they were more distracted with waving their hand and thinking about when they were going to be called on, this took away from the reflecting and learning aspect of the discussion. The students got very excited about the topic and then began telling me stories of their own experiences while getting further and further away from the topic of discussion. This is what made me realize the importance of classroom management and how effective it is for the learning process of the entire class.

The lesson after this was more of an activity to wrap up our Halloween party. To work our way into our activity we had a group discussion and I began with sharing my own thoughts to model what I want the students to share with me. The activity that we were leading into included all of the students forming a circle, then creating our own giant spider web. We did this activity by using a ball of yarn, each student would get the yarn, hold onto the string, then toss the ball of yarn across the circle to another student, once every student had received the yarn, together, we had created a giant spiderweb. To get the students thinking about the idea of a spiderweb, we sat in a circle in the story time area, and I talked about what kinds of things reminded me of Halloween, following my thoughts, I went around to the students individually and asked what they thought of when thinking about Halloween. This strategy really helped the students wait their turn to talk because they could see that everyone was going to get a turn to answer, and it also allowed them to respectfully listen to what their peers had to say, although, a lot of the answers that I received were “candy!”. I think that with a group like mine, it was very beneficial to do it this way, however, it was more time consuming, going forward I will work to incorporate my time management with the other strategies that I implement.

Professional Goal – Kindergarten

My professional goal this week is focused on learning to plan, I specifically went with the goal of responding to different needs within the community. I have noticed that because my classroom is a kindergarten class, the students are at extremely different levels with all of the skills, some of them go through the assignments within minutes with little challenges, others struggle to the point of not even participating. My goal is to create lessons that can have modifications throughout the class as they all work at the same time, rather than having them work on the exact same activity and adjust the activities according to each student as we go.

Steps to achieve the goal:

  1. While planning my lesson and during our class time, I will need to be aware of all of the students’ abilities and struggles.
  2. Give students clear examples.
  3. Support students with adequate background knowledge before any activity or paper work.
  4. Continuously keep track of how students are doing in their activity, make any modifications as needed.
  5. Provide positive feedback and words of encouragement to all students.

Reflection:

My lesson plan was aimed at a healthy lifestyle, focusing more on nutrition. I started the lesson off with a short story with the goal of the kids understanding how impacting the things that they put in their body can be. After the story and getting the students to think about the side effects of all the bad things that they can be consuming, we went through the food guide together. The food guide was really helpful because it gave them a clear visual of what was best and worst for their health, this was very beneficial for my whole class, as they all learn best in a variety of ways. I also sent a food guide home with each student, giving them the encouragement to take it home and share their knowledge with their family was very exciting for all of them! The activity that I made for this lesson was fairly simple for most of the students, some of the students were challenged a bit, but I wanted to make sure it was attainable for them as it was our first look into nutrition. Moving on from this lesson, I would definitely want to create a more challenging activity for some of the students, while getting the rest of the class caught up to their level of understanding. I could do this by having 2 different forms of the same activity, one with options for the students to choose from and another coming straight from their memory.