I had the incredible opportunity to spend 7 weeks in a 3rd grade classroom at Dassa Mckinney Elementary School in the Moniteau School District as a literacy aide. This meant that I came in once a week during the class's scheduled reading time and assisted them in their learning. I formed great relationships with all of the students and I am so thankful to have done my field experience in this classroom.
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Each week of this field looked a little bit different for me. I helped students write their first multi-paragraph essays, guided them in projects, lead small reading groups, taught cursive writing, read to the students, taught a lesson on cause and effect, and assisted with technology. One of my favorite activities was teaching my own lesson (see below for the actual lesson plan). To begin the lesson, I read the students the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. This entire book is a series of causes and effects. We discussed a few of these examples and then used them to define the terms “cause” and “effect.” After this, I split the students into groups of 3. In their groups, they were given a cause and an effect. They had to act out an effect to go with the given cause and a cause to go with their given effect. The students loved this activity and by the end of the lesson, they succeeded in properly defining cause and effect.
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Each of my experiences taught me valuable lessons. Overall though, i felt that my biggest takeaway from this classroom is the importance of engaging students, which is why I placed this description under 3c: Engaging Students in Learning in the Danielson Framework. As typical third-grade students, the students of this classroom were very hyper and excitable. If this energy was not controlled, classroom management was a nightmare. Although the teacher had many behavioral strategies such as reward systems and punishments such as lose or gain of recess, the most effective classroom management strategy was engaging the students. When the students were engaged in the lesson, they did their work well and all that was needed to manage the class were a few reminders to use their inside voices. Going into this field experience, I thought that using silly examples that would cause the students to laugh would lead to an out of control classroom. I quickly learned, however, that the sillier and more relatable the lesson was for students, the more engaged they were, and thus, less bad behaviors occurred. This was a valuable lesson for me to learn and I plan to incorporate this in my future classroom as an antecedent to help prevent bad behaviors.
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*This field experience was during the fall semester of my sophomore year (Fall 2018)*
*There are no photo restrictions on these students*
*There are no photo restrictions on these students*