Hello! Throughout the past semester I worked in a first grade classroom at Mylan Park Elementary school. I have become familiar with a variety of new teaching strategies. Overall, I taught three lessons and did many small activities with the students.
For the first two lessons I focused on enforcing respect and friendship among the children by forming the lessons around The Rainbow Fish. For the first lesson, I read the story aloud and had a class discussion where I asked the students a number of comprehension questions. I was so happy when the kids were eager to respond and answer the questions about the story. They knew them all! Next, I created a sequencing chart and had the students recall the basic events of the story and reflect on why they were important. By the end of the lesson the children understood the moral of the story. This lesson was great for all of the learning styles in the classroom because they had both the story and the pictures on the sequencing chart to assist them in answering the questions, even though most of them only needed their memory.
For the second lesson, I did the sequencing activity a second time to refresh the story for the students. I directed the children to create their own unique rainbow fish using crayons and sequins. After that, they were to write three sentences about what made them a good friend to others. The students really enjoyed creating the fish, and they even used the surrounding paper to make a background. Some even put sequins on drawn in fish to represent the rainbow fish sharing. It was awesome to see the kids really understand the meaning of friendship and respect! The students did not all write their sentences about what made them a good friend. Some wrote about a best friend or an event they did with a friend. I wish they would have wrote what I asked, but I was still glad to see that they at least wrote about friendship in general.
My last lesson was on diversity. I read The Colors of Us aloud to the class and then asked them to create a self-portrait and describe their skin color with a creative word. The students had a blast creating their portraits. They were all so unique and colorful! However, there was a bit of a problem with the descriptive word. Overall, there were only three different words that the class used because the children did not try to think of their own and used their neighbor's instead. I was quite disappointed that the students did not even use some of the examples from the book to describe their portraits.
One of the major problems I saw in the class was talking among the students. In my diversity lesson, I feel that the children did not obtain much knowledge about diversity since they all shared their words. The students did not get the concept that each skin color was unique since they all used the word "peach." At other times I would tell one table to quiet down and when I would walk away, they would begin talking again.
I feel that I have learned to adjust my teaching to be beneficial to different learning styles. I have definitely noticed that every students is unique and one style of teaching is rarely suitable for the whole class. I think this is one of the most important things I have learned thus far because it is a necessity for each student to have an equal opportunity to learn. I was able to work with the children for one-on-one activities that not only gave me a good idea of their individual learning levels, but I grew to know them on a more personal level, as well. I got the chance to see the unique personalities and how their attitudes affected their learning. Overall, I would rate this past semester with this first grade class a 10!
Were you able to work one-on-one with the students? If so, did you observe how the individual personalities affected their motivation to learn?
Were you able to work one-on-one with the students? If so, did you observe how the individual personalities affected their motivation to learn?
Ciao! :)
