Observation #2

This past week I was in the preschool room at Brigham Elementary. The students focused on the sense of taste. This lesson was a little difficult with the small groups since students were not able to taste some of the food due to allergies in the classroom. I think the teachers did an awesome job of being flexible. I worked towards my goal of interacting with diverse learners this week when I led a small group on cocoa powder. The students were not able to taste the cocoa powder so I had the students describe the powder instead. I provided the students with words too to help describe it and then we had a conversation on what the powder might be. A lot of the children said chocolate which I said was correct because without being able to taste it the kids did not know it was bitter. I explained further that it was something that is put inside chocolate. This small group really helped me think on my toes and come up with some out of the box ways to relate this object to the kids. I had to kind of reach and find out where their knowledge was at and see how I could relate it back and make it relevant to the object they were tasting. I think this is a skill that we as teachers will continue developing as we go along but it was extremely helpful to practice it. I think this really helped me move further in my goal because although I may not have had to speak a different language with these students I was still able to come up with diverse topics and sentences to keep the students engaged. One thing I will say that makes this goal rather difficult to work towards is that fact that we are not in the classroom on a regular basis. We have been teaching in pre-k twice and now we are going to move into the kindergarten classroom where kelcey and I have to teach our lesson and we do not know any of the kids. I think a huge part of what makes lesson successful is knowing the learners you are trying to reach with that lesson. I think most teachers in our class are frustrated with this as well. Its hard to know what the kids already know when you barely know the kids yourself. Then you are trying to make sure everyone is doing something in the lesson so that can at least take one thing away from the lesson before we have to leave. I think that although this goal is challenging, it is not impossible. We will use these skills that we are learning now throughout our career and life. This is a skill that will develop throughout our entire lives so it is ok to only have taken baby steps in the long run. I think its just hard to convince ourselves that these baby steps are ok because we really just want to have great improvement.

Exceeds: Over word limit.