Reflection blogpost 1

The goal I set for myself this semester was to gain more experience with diverse learners and more specifically with students who are considered ELL or ESL. I wrote this goal because I want to work in an urban setting in my future and I know that working in an urban setting is going to bring a very diverse group of learners and I want to gain as much educational experience with diverse learners so I have some preparation under my belt. I know that as teachers we tend to teach the way we were taught and I want to make sure I am taught now how to work with students who are different from me and my background so that I can help those students reach their own personal excellence in the future. Last Thursday at Brigham, was a new experience for me because I have not really taught in a classroom yet that has students that can speak multiple languages. The classroom had a large array of materials that were in dual languages. I think it is going to be difficult and certainly challenging for us to teach science lessons to students of dual languages as well as students whom we don't know very well but I am up for the challenge. I want to give the teachers in kindergarten last week a shout-out because I thought we all did an awesome job in that classroom. We all were pretty confused about what was going to happen and how to really carry through with this lesson when we didn't really know our students or much about the school. Somehow though, we were all able to feed off of each other and really help each other to pull off a fairly seamless lesson. The students were all engaged in the lesson and were generally excited to have us in their classroom. I think the teacher also enjoyed seeing how we were interacting with the kids in the classroom. I wish I would have had more time to plan out the game that we were playing in the classroom and that I had known the students more so I could’ve made rules more explicit based on their reactions to regular classroom lessons. I think this really helps when you know the students because only someone who is familiar with the children will really know what the kids need to hear to give an activity. But we did our best to repair any damaging behavior along the way and it was nice to know that I was not alone in the classroom and I could rely on the other teachers in the classroom to help me reinforce the rules. One of my favorite quotes is pictured below. It really reaches me right now because it always strikes me how much I am actually learning from the kids in the classroom and from the surrounding teachers too. It makes me happy that I will never be done learning and that I will strive to challenge my students as much as they challenge me and we will come out better for it. I know that I will be able to look back on these experiences at Brigham and use them as a reference for future teaching and it will help me know what may or may not work for a specific group of students.

Exceeds: I went over the word limit and talked about my future goals. As well as incorporating a quote and picture. 

My Science Autobiography

My name is Annie Poetker. I was born and raised in Vernon Hills, IL, which is located about 30 minutes from Chicago. In Elementary school I remember doing projects on the life cycles of plants and putting beans in a zip lock with a paper towel and examining them everyday. We would write descriptions on worksheets and draw pictures. We learned about how to write science reports, what a hypothesis was, and how to correctly write one. I can't put a specific grade level on any of these because it all blurs together in my mind. I can remember science classes and teachers specifically after 6^th grade. I remember doing research on specific scientists and projects on those. I also remember studying the planets and making models of those planets. I preferred projects and experiments in class and remember those more vividly because I enjoyed hands on work and projects that included artwork.

            I went to high school at Adlai E Stevenson High school, which is not only one of the biggest high schools in Illinois but in the country as well. It was easy to be overwhelmed in that school because there were people everywhere and there were a variety of different levels in each grade so often you didn't know the people in your classes. I was shy in all of these classes but during group work where we were forced to collaborate, I found myself enjoying those times more. So in my high school experience I found myself remembering more experiments and specific topics that I’ll now share. I took natural science my freshman year where we studied rocks and rock formations as well as minerals and how to sort them. I then took biology but I don’t remember much from that class except studying organisms under microscopes. Junior year I took chemistry where we did experiments with beakers and fire and all of the jazzy stuff that most people think of when they picture science. We did experiments where we filled balloons and made our own tie-dye. My last year of High School I took physics where we studied velocity and force and did lots of experiments.

           

            I then went on to study Early Childhood Education at Illinois State University. Coming to the university I had some experience with children but mostly babysitting and nannying with very limited time spent in a classroom. I had no idea what age group specifically I wanted to teach but I always remembered my Kindergarten teacher as my favorite and I always saw her as a role model. So I knew I wanted to teach from the beginning but I decided young children was the prime age group for me. In college so far I have studied geology, physics, and anthropology. I know anthropology is more of a social studies type of class but I combined it with science as well because we did study artifacts and biology of animals. I took physics here at the university because I loved it so much in high school but it was a lot different here from what I expected. It was more the history of physics than it was the physics that I took in high school. I did not enjoy this physics as much because it was all lecture notes and while we did have labs they were on the computer and were not very hands on. I learn a lot better in my science classes when I am using the lecture notes and course information and experimenting with it in hands on experiments.

            I still am not completely sure what age group I want to teach. Through the university I have spent hours in a 1-year-old room, a preschool room, a kindergarten room, and I am now in a 2^nd grade classroom for PDS. These experiences really helped me narrow down which age range I wanted to teach. I know I want to work with kids in preschool or older. But I am still not able to pick a specific grade. I haven’t seen science taught yet in the classroom but I am excited to see it this school year and to learn about it in our classrooms because I enjoyed it throughout high school. For this year and my future classroom I want to make my science lessons as hands on as they can be. I don't want to be a teacher that reads straight from the textbook. I have already bought science books with activities and plans in them. I think small group allows for more experiments because it will be easier for the younger students to do more projects if they do it as a group.

           

            I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago where a lot of the students in my surrounding neighborhood were from the same social class as the same ethnicity and me. But my elementary school and junior high were combined with another high schools district so the school was about 50% white and 40% Hispanic in cultural makeup. Because of the cultural make up of the school a lot of my classes were not officially bilingual but Spanish was spoken in the classroom. This helped me some with diversity but I think I really learned a lot when I came to the university and took classes in diversity. I think college has taught me the most about diversity and how to teach students of different cultural backgrounds. While at the university I traveled to Birmingham, AL with a program called Alternative Spring Break where I taught 4^th grade students in the inner city schools and it changed my life. I fell in love with those students and I have been contemplating working in urban schools since that trip. I think it will be a challenge especially because I did not come from the same background of my students but its still possible to find common ground and I want to make sure all students know they have someone who cares about them.

Here is a picture of one of my classes in Birmingham, AL. They will always be an inspiration to me.