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.