Blog Entry #1

I noticed the teacher in the classroom I did fieldwork for was always busy. She had no down time ever. I was quite amazed that she was able to keep track so well of what needed to be done and in what order. For the most part, the teacher gave me the prep jobs she needed done while she worked with the children. She read to them a lot, which was interesting for me to watch because I'm currently taking Children's Literature and we often talk about how to use books in our classroom lessons. Today, for example, she used a cute story to help the students recognize the "ch" sound. She read the story out loud and had the students raise their hands whenever they heard her say the "ch" sound. It was a creative way to implicate literature into the lesson and to keep the students engaged in the story. The teacher made the students to a lot by themselves. They were put into groups and expected to work out problems as a group instead of asking the teacher every little question they had, which was a brilliant idea because, I noticed, they had a lot of questions. I noticed specifically that she made them guess how to spell words before she would tell them the correct spelling. I think that it's really important for students to at least put effort into doing work on their own because problem solving skills are probably more important for us to teach than whatever specific fact they're trying to learn. The teacher didn't spend a whole lot of time standing in front of the class teaching lessons. She spent, at most, a half hour on a lesson and then moved onto the activities and assignments. I think it's important for teachers to be aware of the attention span of their students. It took only a few minutes for the students to get distracted and lose interest in what the teacher was saying unless she was doing something exceptionally interesting.