Week Four

Proper and Common noun review was our topic for this week. I prepared an activity to get the students more involved in the lesson. I found an activity online that made a game out of the nouns. I gave a common noun like "state" for example and each student on their paper had to list as many states as they could think of in one minute. After the activity we discussed the difference between the two types and I asked them to tell me if certain words were common or proper. they did extremely well and seemed to enjoy the lesson more than any other week before. I really think they got the concepts this week and we all had fun. It just amazes me how a new style of teaching can help get their spirits up. The students again had to stay in for recess, but this week they didn't even ask if they could join the other students because they were having fun learning.

Week Three

This week I tried something new. We were working on complete predicates, simple predicates, and helping verbs. I found an activity online to help them understand the material. I made cards with subjects one 12 pieces and predicates on another 12. Then, they each choose 8 pieces of paper. First, they had to tell the group how many subjects and how many predicates they had in their pile. Second, the students used their pieces and pair them up with another persons to form 12 complete sentences. After they were finished we read the sentences out loud and then discussed what made a subject and a predicate. This seemed to help them understand more than just completing some worksheets. I did see a little improvement when grading the papers later than I had seen in the previous weeks. Well, next week we have linking verbs and noun review.

Week Two

This week I took the same three students out of the classroom to work on some worksheets about prepositions and subjects. I need to find some other way to teach these children the concepts on the worksheets. Each week I have three worksheet all in similar format where they circle the answer and then move on. We work as a group and most of the time it is like they do not even know what the concepts are, they just guess. I need to find a way to help them understand what a preposition/subject is rather than just focusing on an answer. I plan on looking up some activities I can use next week to help them understand. Also, I really don't like that I have to pull them out of class for this. I feel like they are missing other important material while they are with me. They really don't like going with me because this week she made me keep them in for recess. I understand they need the extra help but when they know they are missing out it's hard to keep them on task. I want to find something fun we can do with these language concepts to keep them engaged in the lesson.

Week One

Today we started our service learning at coolspring elementary. I am in a fourth grade class. The first thing I saw when I entred the classroom was cardboard dividers on each students desk so the could not see the other students. This sort of gave me an idea of what the teacher was like. i was then informed of what my role in the class would be. i was to take three students that were having difficulties outside of the classroom to do some small group lessons in language. During the students recess time, I talked with my teacher about her class and how she manages the students. She said that this year the school was trying a new system in which all the learning disabled students and those with any type of disablility were placed in the same classroom. She was the one who had all the fourth graders with disabilities. This was sort of disturbing for me to hear because to me these student need to be in class with other students that do not have disablities in order for them to learn from the other students as well as the teacher. Also, this teacher told me that she groups the students according to ability. I was told that if I was in the classroom for any lessons I was to sit with a specific one of the three tables to help those students because they need it the most. After I was introduced to the class and free to go out on my own, I took the three students that I was to work with down to the library. I was to first give them a timed multiplication test and then do three worksheets on prepositions. The worksheets seemed to me like a waste of the students time because they were given a box of possible choices and then told to fill in the blanks with the correct words. Whatever they did not finish was to be taken home for homework. When we sat down to begin the worksheets, the students asked me what a preposition was. How was I suppossed to do the worksheets (that had no explaination of what a preposition was) with them if they did not even understand the concept. Thankfully, I recently did my lesson plan for this call on prepositions so I used an activity from that to teach them the meaning of prepositions. I had them stand up and follow a prepositional phrase command in order to help them understand that a preposition describes location in reference to another object. Such as: stand behind the desk, or crawl under the table. This helped them to understand the concept and then they were able to complete all three worksheets before we had to go back to the class. All in all, even just being there for one day taught me a lot about how some teachers teach and how to improve on their methods in my own classroom.