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Elissa Rennie ENGL 1102 Hinnant 3/5/14 An Ethnography of Kindergarten at Lebanon Road Elementary

Kindergarten within the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools has become a place where the students have to be able to learn and comprehend information at a fast pace. The purpose of this paper will be to explore how student and teacher interaction affects the students academic performance. The classroom environment is set up to be caring, safe, and orderly. It is to encourage the students to explore and allow them not to be afraid of ridicule if they get an answer wrong (Rennie). The students are taught using common core standards for that year. The teachers use visual kinesthetic, auditory, and tactile teaching methods with their students (McMakin). The kindergarten teachers meet once a week to go over their lesson plans as a whole with each other. During these meetings they talk about the main lesson that they need to teach the students. Throughout the meeting they were discussing different ways to teach the lesson. They were also sharing their own individual ideas that they had found with the other teachers that they thought would help best with the students learning. The way the teachers teach their students always impacts what they learn. I will be exploring how this interaction affects the students academic performance. I. Morning Work Morning work starts the students day from 7:15 7:45 AM. Each day the students are expected to come into the classes room unpack and start the morning work for that day. Morning

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work is different each day and if the finish early they can draw or do an activity of their choice. For example, the students could work on writing sight words, do literacy or math worksheets, or finish work that needs to be completed from the day before. Morning work is quiet, independent work that the students begin their day with because their teacher needs to be able to monitor the hallway from their door. The main purpose of quiet morning work is to introduce the students to a new school day and what they are going to learn that day through an easy to complete worksheet. II. Balanced Literacy Balanced literacy is the students longest learning block from 7:45 9:00 AM. At the beginning of each lesson the teacher will introduce a letter from the alphabet to the students. The students will then have to be able to tell the teacher what the letter is and what sound it makes. The teacher will also introduce new letter blends to the students. The students will learn what the letter blend sounds like and what words will have the blend. They will then have to write out words that have the blend sound they are working on. They will then go on into their main lesson of the day. I observed the student learning about information/non-fiction books. The teacher uses chart paper to give the students a visual about what they would have to look for when reading. They learned about headings, diagrams, labels, and captions. The teacher wrote the word down, told the students its definition, and then gave a representation of all the words through a picture. They were taught a simple definition and where to find each part in a book. The teacher showed examples of the words to the students through drawings and by showing them a representation in a non-fiction book. To make sure the students know the information the teacher asked them repeatedly what the word was, what it meant, and where to find it in a book. The teacher also had the students come up and identify a certain part of what they just learned on the chart paper.

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Later on that week the student were going to take the information that they just learned and by themselves apply the information to their own books. The student benefits from this type of learning because it allows them to process information in many different ways, so that is easier to remember what they have learned later on when they need to apply it to their independent work. III. Math Math is from 9:00 10:00 AM. The students math lesson starts with them sitting in front of the computer and the teacher playing songs off of YouTube. They listen to and sing along with songs about the days of the week, months of the year, the seasons, and counting to one hundred. When they are done listening to the songs the students are dismissed back to the main carpet area so that they can do calendar and their lesson. When they do calendar the teacher will have a student come up to tell the class the weather. The teacher will then have multiple students come up and find the right day of the week to answer Yesterday was , Today is , and Tomorrow will be . They will then read those sentences out load as a class. Calendar is taught during math because it is in the math curriculum and it helps with the students counting skills. The lesson that I observed had the teacher reading a word problem to the whole class. The word problem was adding numbers together. The teacher had the students come and draw each portion of the problem on chart paper. The drawing gives the students a visual representation of the math problem because the students are just learning addition problems. The class would then count together the number of circles drawn each time. The teacher would then write out the empty number sentence and have the students write in the correct number and answer. When the students main lesson is done the students are allowed to go to any math center of their choice until it is time to go to lunch.

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IV. Writing Writing is from 10:43 11:30 AM, but does not always start on time it just depends on when they get back from lunch. Throughout the classroom there are many boards and charts that were made to help the students learn to write better. The main board for writing are the Writing Reef, which explains in ways for the students to use pictures, labels, words, lists, and sentences in their writing. Another important board is the Vocabulary Word Wall, which contains all the sight words a student will need to know for writing and for advancing into a higher reading group. There are many charts made by the teacher from past lessons hung up throughout the classroom. These charts contain information on leaving spaces, about characters, writing words, thing the student can write about, and what to draw. The lesson that I observed was a continuation from the lesson they had the day before. The students were going to do independent work and write about puppies. This exercise is based on a story they read about puppies and a chart that they made together that listed things about puppies. Their independent work went along with what they had learned about information/non-fiction books from their balanced literacy lesson. The students had to give their work a heading, draw a picture of a puppy, label their puppy, and then write 3 sentences about their puppy. The students used words form the class chart about puppies to make their sentences. Throughout the independent work time the students would come up to the teachers and ask how to spell words that they did not know. The teacher would help the student sound out the word so that they could learn how to spell by themselves with only a little bit of help. Once the students had turned in their best work to the teacher they would then read from the books at their table until it was time for the next lesson. V. Guided Reading

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Guided reading is from 11:30 AM 12:45 PM. All the kindergarten students are grouped together by their reading level (Rennie). All of the kindergarten classes switch their students between all the teachers based on their reading level. The students are then broken into smaller groups in the classroom. One group was working on making sight words with magnets by using the vocabulary word wall to help them. In another group, the teacher has the students call out the sight words that were shown on flash cards and the teacher would write down the words that the group still needed to learn. The teacher also had the students putting words together by saying the beginning sound of the first letter and then adding the remaining word to it and having the student repeat what they heard until they figured out the word. When the Kindergarten classes do not switch the students do silent independent work. Their work was sorting pictures with the beginning letter sounds of pl-, sl-, bl-, and fl-. Before the students began working the teacher told them what each picture was and had them repeat the name of each picture so that they knew the beginning sound of each picture. The students were to cut out the pictures and place them on a chart in the column with the correct beginning sound. The teacher would help the students identify what a picture was if they did not know it so that they could group the picture correctly. During this time a teaching assistant comes and helps out with the students. This allows the teacher to have some spare time to test the students on their knowledge about sight words, numbers, letters, and shapes while the teaching assistant answers the students questions. VI. Science/Social Studies On the week that I observed, all of kindergarten was being taught science. Science and social studies is taught from 12:45 1:20 PM. Science and social studies are taught on a weekly schedule and switches each week. At the beginning of the science lesson the teacher read a book called the 5 Senses and what part of the body is used with the senses. After the book was finished

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the teacher gave the example of bouncing a ball and asked the class which three out of the five senses they would use. The teacher then called on a student to give her one of the answers until they had given all the correct answers. The teacher then asks the student to list the senses and tell what part of the body they would use with each sense. The teacher then put up a piece paper with each sense on it on the white board. The teacher then had the students call out things that would go along with each sense to be written down in each column on the board. For things you could touch the students said dogs, a ball, and cats. For things you could hear the students said words, the teacher, and music. For things you could see the students said books, pictures, and flowers. For things you could smell the students said smoke, flowers, and food. Finally, for things you could taste the students said grapes, vegetables, and chicken. When I observed the students social studies lesson they were learning about Japan. Each kindergarten class was learning about a different country. They are going to spend about 2 weeks learning about their country and then the students are going to present for their parents what they have learned. The teacher read to the class a book that gave the students some basic information about Japan. From the book the teacher taught the students how to say hello and good bye in Japanese. They learned about how Japan is made up of islands, the clothing that is worn, the food that is eat, and the traditions that are celebrated. The teacher then had the students move to in front of the computer so that they could look at some pictures from Japan. These pictures showed the older buildings and castles, the volcano, how they dressed, and what the beds were like. The teacher showed the students this so that they could see the differences between the United States and Japan. The teacher then told the students that the red circle on Japans flag represents the sun and that they were going to be making their own flag for Japan. To make their flag the teacher told the students that they were going to take small pieces of red construction paper and glue

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them inside the circle on their flag. These flags are what the students will be holding during the presentation for their parents. Some of the other ways the students will be learning about Japan include making examples of Japans wooden dolls, wind socks, and arches with paper. The students are also going to learn where Japans capital is on a big map of Japan that the teacher will be drawing. VII. Reflection/Conclusion Observing a kindergarten class at Lebanon Road Elementary has allowed me to see that the students are hard workers and able to both understand and retain multiple subjects in one day that they are able to apply later on in the school year. I have learned that the student and teacher interaction is one of the main reasons that the students have a good academic performance. The way the teachers are teaching the students allows them to be more focused on what they are learning, which makes it harder to become distracted by other stuff that is going around them. This allows the students to be successful because they are learning new abilities that are helping with their learning now, so that they can move in their academic career without having to struggle too much with finding ways to remember and learn the information given to them. Some of the ways that have really helped with the students learning are computers, songs with movement, competition with their classmates, and partner work (McMakin). Another important part to teaching is that the core classes are taught in the morning when the students are refreshed and learning is optimal (Rennie).

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Works Cited: McMakin, Jennifer. Personal Interview. 21 Feb. 2014. Rennie, Marci. Personal Interview. 21 Feb. 2014.