Last One!

April 15, 2015   What is the most important thing you have learned during fieldwork observation? Why?

The most important thing I have learned over the last few months of doing observations has probably been how important it is to connect with your students. I have loved observing in my second grade classroom. I can see how my teacher has really connected with her students. She loves them so much. I love seeing how much they trust her and how they feel completely safe with her. It has been fun to be able to be in the classroom the last half of the semester. I think it would have been more of a learning experience as to how to start a relationship with the kids, if I would have been in the classroom at the beginning of the school year. Because I would have seen how to begin the relationship and how to bond with the kids. 

I also think that having order is way important as well. I think that having order in the classroom helps you as the teacher to feel more focused on your kids and not on cleaning  and organizing your classroom. My mom is a teacher and she always tells me how much easier it is to be focused. But not just having your classroom clean, but having your kids know what you want and how you want things to go in the classroom. Making sure they know that you are the teacher and that you are there is very important. 

I really loved this assignment. Observing in the classroom has been a lot of fun. I have had a chance to gain some friendships with the students I get to work with and I am going to miss them when the school year is over. But this just made me way more excited to be a teacher and have a classroom of my own!  

Number 7

April 10, 2015 What are the procedures the teacher uses to make everything run smoothly in the class?

My teacher that I work with has some great ways that she manages her class. One of my favorite things that she does is, "hands up!" When she says this, the kids stop whatever they are doing and put their hands on their head and look at the teacher. I like this idea because you can then see who isn't listening and it is just an easier way for the students to pay attention. With their hands on their heads, they can't do much of anything else. 

Another thing that my teacher does is one of the things we discussed in this module. She is very good at the motivation and consequences. She has this system of tickets. She will randomly hand them out for good behavior. Or she will have the "motherload" of ten or fifteen tickets at once. It is a good way of getting the kids to be on task. And it is actually really cool at how many stay on task. It is amazing how students will act when there are rewards in  the aspect. It is a good thing to keep in mind for when I am a teacher. 

Number 6!!!

April 3rd, 2015:   What strategies does the teacher use to actively engage the students? How effective are these? 

The teachers have a ton of different roles that they have to accomplish during the day and sometimes it can be stressful. There are many different types of strategies that they have to try to get all of the students engaged and feeling like they are being included in everything. And that is hard. There are many different kinds of personalities in the classroom with so many different students, and it is difficult to try to get everyone in on something. In my classroom which I have been volunteering in over the past couple of months, I have noticed a few different ways that the teacher does things to keep all of her kids engaged. 

One of my favorite methods is here, party rocker. It is this speaker/disco ball that is connected wirelessly to the iPad. You go into the app and turn on the music and the disco ball. She does this when the kids are working really hard for longer periods of time. She will let them work, and after a few minutes she will turn it on for about 30 seconds and let them dance all crazy. After she turns it off they have to get immediately back to work or she won't use it the rest of the day. I love it because it keeps them all active and they love it. 

Another thing she does is pair share. All the students get into pairs and share something that they have learned during the lesson. I like that because it gets all the students talking and they are talking about what they learned. There are many other strategies that teachers can do, and I am excited to see what works best for me when I am a teacher! 

Blog Number 5

March 25, 2015 What do you think is the most challenging role a teacher plays? Why?

The biggest thing that I have gotten out of this last module and everything we have talked about this last month is how you always need to make sure everyone feels included. That the students won't feel left out and that they are all on the same track with NCLB. This I feel is the hardest and most challenging thing for teachers because it puts so much pressure on them to always be testing and always having to see where their students are. It gives so much extra pressure on the teacher. They always feel like they have to be making sure all their kids are on the same level, and if they aren't a lot of teachers feel as though they failed as a teacher for the whole class, not just the student who is at a lower level than the other students. 

In my last couple of weeks in my second grade classroom, I have actually seen this. The teacher I work with, I love her so much. She is an amazing teacher, but she is so stressed about all of the tests and extra things she has to do to keep her students on the same level. I have seen it first hand not just in her classroom, but in my mom's classroom as well. Students all are going to learn at different paces. They are not all going to understand the same subject at the same time. And it isn't always a reflection on the teacher. Some students just have a harder time understanding the subjects. I have seen teachers beat themselves up over the fact that a student in their class isn't understanding it. But they sometimes can't do anything to change that. 

I know that when I am finally a teacher, I will probably do the same thing. But it is nice knowing now that it won't be my fault if they don't always get it. Sometimes, you do so much for someone and they still don't get it and there isn't anything else you can do about it. I personally think that NCLB is a little too harsh because all I have seen it do is work the teachers even more than they should be. So many extra tests and things to do. It is too much at times. 

Number Four.

March 10, 2015: How Does the Teacher Manage Assessment?
In my second grade classroom the teacher has many different ways of how she manages her assessment. Because I am in her classroom when she does reading/writing time I have only seen her do those assessments. During writing time, she usually has anywhere from one to three kids come to the back table with her. She watches how they write, how their spelling is, how well they stay focused, etc. I think that this is a good way to assess a couple students at a time. And it works well for her class. During reading time, she has the rest of the class silent read while she pulls one kid to the back table to read to her. At this time she listens to their pronunciation, how fast they read and how well they read. This to me is an excellent way of assessing them short term and long term. Because she goes through each student and so she can see how they are doing a couple months apart from each reading.

I have really learned a lot from this teacher. She is such a good teacher and she really knows how to keep her kids in line. I like seeing all of the different things that she does because it gives me good ideas on what I want to do and what I may not want to do when I am finally a teacher. In assessment I am not really fond of how she does the writing assessment because she always pulls the same students to the back table to watch them. I think she should possibly switch them every time like she does with reading. I know she is trying to help those few kids get up to benchmark, but I think it would be a good idea to see how all of the kids are doing as well.

Three Down!

February 26th, 2015: What modifications for learners who are exceptional do you see?

These last couple of weeks I have begun working with the few kids in my class who have a harder time staying focused and who sometimes throw tantrums. It has been interesting working with them. I work with them during their writers workshop time, which is when they are to be quiet and come up with "five finger" stories. Once they finish one, they just move onto another one. And this time is really difficult for the few boys I work with. My job is to silently, but so they know, watch them and keep reminding them to stay on task. They are so easily distracted by everything that is going on around them. If one person raises their hand to ask a question, it throws my boys off and they are all of a sudden just staring into space. Or if you tell one of them to get busy on their paper, sometimes it just makes him have a tantrum. 

Just a couple of weeks ago, the teacher I work with came up with an idea to start giving them one gummy bear if they are doing a good job during their writing time. So she would watch them and if they went a couple of minutes without needing reminding to stay on task, she would give the each a gummy bear. At first I wasn't too sure how all the other kids in the class would react, because gummy bears are awesome and they weren't getting any. But they were all so good about it. And the last couple of weeks since she started doing it, the three boys are doing so amazing! 

We also give the boys so many compliments. Randomly walking by and just saying, "Wow! I really appreciate that you boys are doing so well!" or, "Keep up the good work guys! I really love seeing how hard you work." And it really seems to boost their confidence and they want to keep impressing us. They are doing so great but it is also a struggle to keep them focused. With what we have been talking about ADHD this last module, has really stuck with me, because I help these kids, and it is nice to know different ways to help them out. 

Number Two!

February 12th, 2015 Tell about an opportunity you had to work with a small group

This past week I was in my second grade class and the teacher asked me to take a group of kids who have a harder time focusing on their assignments to the back table and work with them. I always get excited when I am able to actually work with the kids and not just copy papers or grade assignments. As the group of the three boys were coming back to the table, I knew what was going to happen because I have seen how they work and I know how they were going to be when they got to the table. As I suspected once they got to me, they immediately started whispering to each other and asking where the others were on their assignments/sharing answers with each other. So I seperated them as much as I could. I had them each sit one chair apart so they weren't right together. This group of boys has a really hard time not talking to each other and it was supposed to be quiet in the classroom. But we worked on it. I had to remind them so many times that they needed to keep working. I would lightly touch their papers when they were off task so they knew to get back to it. We were together for about 10 minutes and it went pretty well. I love those boys, even though they are hard to handle a lot of the time. It was fun working with them.

Since my last post we have talked about segregation in the classrooms and things that happened in the earlier times in schools. I decided to look around at the school I am at and see if there is still segregation today. Not racism segregation but different types of segregation. And suprisingly I saw a few. The kids in my classroom don't realize that is what they are doing, but it happens. The girls stay away from the boys, if a student has some sort of disability the other students don't play with them, and I saw that they split off into groups of the "hyper" students and the quiet students.

I was actually kind of suprised that there are ways that segregation is still in school. I am glad to see that color of skin and race don't have any issues (at least not in the school I am working in) but it is interesting to see the different types of segregation that happens in the schools today.

The Number One

January 24th, 2015 How does the knowledge of the way people learn relate to the experience of being a teacher? 

Hi! I am Kasey Hammer and this is my blog about my experiences in the classroom. I am observing in a 2nd grade class and I love it! Some of the things that I have done in the last couple of weeks have been, grading papers, leading group discussions with the kids, playing organized games, walking around and helping students during project time and observing the teacher. It has been so much fun actually being in a classroom. When I am able to work with the groups, I get so excited to have my own classroom someday. It makes me want to get through school as fast as I can just so I can start teaching! But I know that I have a lot to learn before I get to that point.

This last module that we had really opened my eyes to the learning theories. I actually did not know that there were so many different ways that people can learn. It was really cool to learn that and to have that knowledge for when I am a teacher will be really helpful. I have noticed that my teacher I observe is really good at changing her ways of teaching. But I have started to notice that she is a very visual teacher. She gives her kids lots of examples of things that they are supposed to be doing. For example: this last week when I was there they were starting to work on an ocean animal report and she had LOTS of examples of how the project was supposed to look at the beginning, middle and end. I thought it was great because I myself am a very visual learner and I would enjoy having that from my teacher. But for the kids who aren't very visual it could be a problem. I noticed that she was really good at explaining what she wanted them to do as well. 

It has been fun to be in the classroom and have the chance to observe a teacher. It helps me see good things and not so good things. It also helped me realize that a lot of the kids have different ways of learning, and they all can't have visual examples and get what they are supposed to do really fast. You, as the teacher, have to change the ways you teach so that all the students can get used to the different learning ways and have a fair chance. And if the teacher doesn't change the ways they teach, the children who have a different way of learning will get behind and the teacher can become stressed. It is important to keep changing how you teach so everyone has a good experience in your class. :)