PPB: Working with Individuals

Working with Individuals 1:PPB
I worked with a little girl named Madison. Ms. Anderson had just finished reading the class a Dr. Seuss book and the students were to go back to their seats and write in their journal about Dr. Seuss. They were told to write a sentence using rhyming words like Dr. Seuss does in his story and then draw a picture to go with it. Madison wanted to write, “A fox is in a box”. She did well to remember the first letter is capital, but she had some trouble remembering to put spaces between her words. She wrote a b instead of a d, which is a common problem for kindergarten kids. She also made sure she put a period at the end of the sentence; she was excited about that part. After she wrote the sentence she realized she wanted to include the fact that the fox was red. I explained to her that she could write another sentence and say the fox is red. She wasn’t near as focused on writing that sentence; she kept forgetting what she was writing and started getting curious about what everyone was doing around her. She finally finished it, after trying to write the same sentence twice. She drew a picture of her fox and colored it red. She drew some grass, a sunshine, and some flowers and we talked about her our favorite colors. She was excited to write her sentence at the beginning of the activity because she liked rhyming words, but I think she just got bored and was ready for something new after a while. She is a curious and happy child who seems like she is much more interested in other things than staying in her seat and remembering to space between her words. I think the activity went well, it wasn’t too long, and she managed to finish the assignment.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Journal Composition 4: Developmentally Appropriate Practice and Curricular Areas
In my fifth grade classroom, Mrs. Hodges does not implement as many developmentally appropriate practices as she should. The students stay in their seat the whole morning and there is no social interaction with peers to help each other learn. She does not use a lot of group work, but she does allow for students to help other each other with subjects where one may be having some problems. Students are not given many chances to interact with one another and I feel some students would benefit from group discussions and getting out of their seat. I think she needs to introduce more variety in her instructional strategies in order to get more positive feedback from her students’ engagement.

According to Dewey, who is part of the basis of Developmentally Appropriate Practices, “We learn from our experiences. To facilitate learning, the teacher needs to create an environment that motivates interest and curiosity” (Lemlech p.41). Students need to be engaged in the lesson and need to make connections with what they already know in an attempt to build on their previous knowledge. This principle correlates with Piaget as he says, “the individual gathers information or data through experiences and takes into account prior knowledge” (Lemlech p.41). This is important in the classroom so students don’t get bored, tired, or uninterested. Another way to keep that from happening is to use a variety of teaching methods to make sure you are catering to the needs of every individual student.

Mrs. Hodges has not used many strategies in her teaching methods. During math, she tells each student to open their book to a certain page and they go over homework from the night before. She works most of it out on the board and then asks the students if they have any questions. The work is too hard for some students and they need to move at a slower pace or have different work to adjust to their capability. This is not happening; therefore there are a handful of students who are doing poorly in math because they are not getting the individual help they need to succeed.

I would not say that there is a lot of student-centered teaching in this classroom. In this strategy of teaching, the child has an important role in learning their part of the assignment and is then responsible for sharing or “teaching” their part to the group. (DAP Power Point slide 14). There is no group work, and all of the teaching I have seen has been done by the teacher at the front of the room, using the expo board. The students have never moved their desks around or even participated in a class activity that is not done in their seats since I have been observing. Interactive activities are not present and neither is incorporating ongoing experiences with real life situations. Those examples are part of the constructivist view of teaching and I just don’t feel a lot of those strategies are being implemented in her classroom.