Yesterday October 16th, 2018 was my second day at the school for my Field Experience. To start off the day we had an assembly to acknowledge the students who have shown their Best Effort Always. At the assembly I was able to meet 3 more of the staff at the school, I however cannot remember their names because it was a very brief hello. We then went back to the classroom where I had then met my coop teachers TA, who she had just gotten last week to help her out. After the assembly then they went and chose books at their reading level to take home and read, from a room beside their classroom. This is their home reading books. The books are organized by their reading level. Last week the kids had started working on a strategy for comprehension which was visualization. They had the book read to them last Friday. It was for the book “Where the wild things are” by Maurice Sendak. They were then given a handout with a descriptive part from the book and they would then draw what they saw for that part, they did this for two parts of the book. They also did another one based off of a story called “The sea creature from the deep”. They did the same thing as the Maurice Sendak one and they visualized what the creature looks like from the story. This was done a few classes before todays class.
My co-op teacher had also described the reward system in more depth to me and my partner, the rewards system they have in the classroom is based on their best efforts and not grade and individual students have a chart on the wall (5×5) and when ever they are behaving they will get a stamp on it. They either all get a stamp as a due to a class effort or they are given a stamp for doing something by themselves. After all of their squares have been stamped they get a prize. For prizes they get pencils, erasers, spinning tops, sharpeners, and bracelets. Mrs. Orban does not give out candy usually unless they have had a super day. Usually receive suckers.
My partner and I also had the pleasure of meeting one of what I believe was the FIAP teacher, I also cannot remember her name as I met her in the morning after just arriving on the school playground. The school does include a lot of TA’s and EA’s in their school to help out. The school is also very diverse and has children of all ethnicities attending it or children with learning disabilities or a different type of disability. Although the school does have a very low EAL population found within the school.
As for the community surrounding the school it is pretty much all house. We even asked our coop teacher and she said you will not find a conveniences store or a 7-11 on any of the streets unless you go into more of the shopping areas. The families that mostly live in that area are middle class families but not like the lower or the higher up middle class just more of the middle of the scale middle class. We had also found out that there are several group homes in the surrounding areas and some of the students that go to the school and some are from them.
I am excited to be able to go back to this school next Tuesday as I am getting to know the kids better and they are starting to warm up to me and my partner, so much that when my co-op teacher told them we were leaving and will not be back tell next Tuesday they got all upset but then our co-op teacher reminded them we will be back soon and they all got so happy which really made my whole day seeing that the children did not want us to go!