Tuesday October 23rd, 2018 was my 3rd day at my Field Experience school. The moment I walked up to that classroom door I had two of the girls I had started to get to know better jump up and down saying they were happy I had come back, and both came up to me to give me a hug. This part of the morning had made my entire day, I was glad to see that some of the kids were warming up to me!
As for the rest of the morning we had switched up the schedule a bit and instead of doing the Daily 5 we did Literacy Reading and Social Studies. The Literacy reading involved my co-op teacher who first read them the short story “Hannah’s Halloween Scare” and after she had read them the story, she put it under an over head type thing that projected it onto their smart board. After she had done this she then read the story with the class sentence by sentence and as a class the kids had to find the mistakes such as spelling or if a name was not capitalized.
After doing their literacy activity they then went on to do Social Studies, and for their Social Studies class they were learning about different parts of communities I guess you could say such as Urban places, Suburban, Rural and First Nations communities(Reserves). They however, have been more focused on learning about reserves. This is something I found different because I do not remember ever learning about Reserves in Elementary school, I did here about it throughout my Junior High years but never really started to learn about it in-depth until my Grade 12 year when I took Native Studies. But a neat thing that our co-op teacher does with her Social Studies class is that she has a First Nations girl in her class that has started trying to learn Cree with one of her friends in the class, so our co-op teacher asks her to teach the class at least 3 new Cree words a week to help her open up more and want to learn, she has even taught the class part of her Jingle Dance which is a type of First Nations dance. After doing this activity for about 20-30 minutes within a matter of second all of the kids just lost 100% of their focus on the subject and she then switched to letting them show us their friendship song they have been learning to sing and create dance moves for.
As for the question this week our co-op teacher likes to use many different ways to get children learning for example in her Math class, she has been doing number says which involves numbers 1-100 or she used laminated number charts and class beads to highlight the numbers on the sheet. The number sheet goes like this let’s say you have your glass bead on number 39 she will ask you to move it to a number 10 less than 39 so you move the glass bead to 29. Our coop teacher also does not force students to do something they cannot or do not want to do and by doing this the student then comes to realize they do want to participate. Our co-op teacher has also noticed over the years that not all learners are the same. For example, some are stand up learners, so she allows them to move around the room to find a spot they can work at, this is why she has a stand-up desk at the front of the room and back. There are even some kids who do best with wearing ear mufflers, doing work in a corner, or doing it by themselves at a desk away from everyone. Also, not every learner is the same because she has asked for us to look out for students who are independent workers when it comes to one subject but then when it comes to another subject, they need more help. Our co-op teacher has taken it upon herself to provide all of these students with areas or items to help them succeed and not be distracted. Our co-op teacher also notices some students are verbal or visual learners so throughout her lessons she try’s to provide material that suits both types of learners. Our co-op teacher even demonstrates how to do something for the children, so they can get the hang of it. For example, when she went through the short story “Hannah’s Halloween Scare” she was demonstrating it for them so next time they can do it themselves, she did not just model it she showed they how to do it correctly. I also liked how our coop teacher promoted the knowledge of learning the Cree language in her classroom by letting the one girl teach the class.