My first field placement in the fall semester of 2018 was at W.F Ready school in the east of Regina. I worked with a lively group of grade 3 students, the group was very welcoming and was always eager to participate in what the teacher had planned for them. I got to participate in several subject throughout my stay at the school, my favorites were french, visual arts and language arts. Sarah my cooperating teacher always had really neat ideas for her lessons and was a master at getting the kids involved in the lesson. She would often have a video or an activity to set the kids into an appropriate head space for the lesson at hand. She kept everything really well organized so that when a class began, she would tell the kids what they would need to participate in the class and the kids would go and fetch the materials they needed on their own. There was never any wasted time in her classroom because the kids were so familiar with how she organized her class.
In her language arts class kids would start off with 15 minutes of reading, we would walk around the room and read along with the students for a few pages and help them with any words they were struggling with. Then daily 5 would start, this was an activity where students would split into their assigned groups and participate in one of the 5 activities: Read by yourself, read with others, play on ipad, play games and join the table. The first two are self explanatory, the third had students login to their classroom ipads and play language based games on them, they could choose to reading or writing games. The fourth activity, had the groups play word based board games that Sarah made up, kids were rolling dice, reading and pronouncing words and having fun at the same time. The last activity had one group join her at the main table in the middle of the classroom where she and the students would read through a small book and talk about it, this was her means of evaluating what students level of reading and comprehension students were at. Once she was done assessing the group she was with she would have the groups shift to the next activity in the order. I really liked this method because it kept everyone occupied, but also excited for what was next, there was never any stagnation because the games would break up the monotony of just reading and gave the kids something to look forward to. This method also gave Sarah the means to evaluate the kids on a more individual level while still making good use of her class time.
Visual arts was always a blast because it gave the kids time to play and express themselves, something I feel as an adult that I don’t do enough of anymore. Something that really impressed me about this class is how Sarah used it to involve cross-curricular content. A challenge that teachers face is to try and connect everything students learn together to make it feel more practical, but visual arts really seems to be a great place to do this. Two lessons stand our from the rest from my time there, the lesson about soils and the lesson about shapes. Sarah’s science lessons were covering the topic of different soils and their interactions with water, and for this visual arts class Sarah brought in clay for the students to work with. The kids got to mold their sculptures and use the water to smooth out the cracks on their masterpiece to give it a sleeker look, this gave them a literal tie in to how a soil they were learning about reacts with water. The other stand-out was the shapes lesson, the kids were learning different shapes in their math class and Sarah used this opportunity to sneak in some cross-curricular learning. Students were given the option to use paper or modeling putty to build a structure with at least three different shapes. This was an interesting lesson because it gave the kids a good perception of what three-dimensional shapes made more stable bases of support for the rest of their structure and which ones where better options for the top of their creation.
French was fun because it was the only class I got to attend that Sarah didn’t teach. It was a personal interest of mine because I grew up going to a francophone school and I really had no concept of what core french classes were like in public schools. The class that I got to attend was a fun one because the students were learning their numbers in french and were playing a game to do so. The game had students counting to 20 as a group, in turns kids would either the next or the next two numbers in the proper order to pass to the next player. The students were eliminated one by one when they took too long to say the right number or they landed on 10 or 20 in the count, this added strategy and quick thinking to the game because you need to avoid landing on 10 or 20 and try and force others into that position. This really seemed to help the kids memorize their numbers. This class also however made me realize the necessity of really good french teachers, since these kids often won’t have parents who can speak french nor do they live in a french community, they won’t get enough practice outside of school to retain the language. It’s critical then that the french teachers make the best of their time to hopefully inspire the kids to practice on their own time.
Overall the experience at W.F Ready was a fantastic learning experience and I look forward to my next opportunity to get involved in the classroom to pick up the tricks that other teachers have developed.