Science Post #5

            This past week I had the opportunity to observe and help teach in the kindergarten classroom at Brigham after being in and teaching in the preschool room. I enjoyed it a lot and I could immediately see numerous differences between preschool and kindergarten. They were much more mature and outspoken. They were definitely more outgoing than the preschool class and wanted to participate more in the activities and discussion.

            My goals that I have set for myself were mostly geared toward the preschool classroom but they still apply for kindergarten because there were still some English Language Learners in the kindergarten class. The goal that I came up with is, to meet and interact with the students who are English Language Learners so I gain some insight on how they learn best. Since the kindergarten students were much more active and participated more than the preschool students, I was able to work more on my goal. I got to interact and talk more with the students during the activities. Although, it was hard to do a lot of interacting because of the note taking that we were required to do. In the preschool room, when we would give the students directions, probably about half of them would not do anything and the other half would follow directions. So the teacher would repeat our directions in Spanish and then everybody would participate. But in the kindergarten room, barely any Spanish was spoken which was really great to see because that means that they are understanding English better. Although I did see many directions, labels, etc. around the room in both Spanish and English but that is something that is needed and very helpful when there are English Language Learners in a classroom.

            I think that a big part of my goal was to really get to know individual students and I feel like I did not achieve this aspect of my goal. It is really difficult to try to get to know students when you only see them maybe once or twice a month. I think that this is difficult for the students too because it is important for them to have routine and for us to come in and have different teacher each week could be stressful for them. But it is definitely hard for us to make progress with them.

            But it has been beneficial to learn about and try to accommodate young English Language Learners when writing lesson plans. In my clinicals so far, I have not had a lot of experience with teaching English Language Learners so this experience so far has helped me learn as a teacher.

            I think that the teachers that taught this week did a good job when it came to accommodating English Language Learners. They included a lot of visuals when teaching and I even heard one of the teachers speaking a little bit of Spanish to the students. This is a great way to connect and get to know the students better. It shows that you care about them and their learning. Learning simple words and phrases in a different language that your students speak will be beneficial to you and to them!