Isabelle Tearse

January 23, 2018

8:30 -10:30 am

Literacy centers

Observation & Participation

I observed literacy centers in a Kindergarten classroom at Venetia Valley. The

learning objectives were diriment at each of the various centers. At the center I was at, I

was working with children to write sentences about what the weather looked like in

specific pictures. At the teacher’s center she was helping kids work through learning

about the /th/ sound and how this can help them in the future with spelling. The teacher

had made it very clear that at my table students were to use their best spelling by

sounding words out and that it was more important that they were writing sentences than

they were spelling things correctly. When working with the groups I made sure to hand

out the colored markers so that time was not wasted arguing over which marker they

would use. It was clear that the students were learning how to construct sentence because

in the beginning their sentences would not make sense however towards the end of the

rotation I was able to see the students grasping the information and formulating more

complicated senses as well as those that grammatically made sense. Throughout this time

I would help students figure out how to spell works be helping them sound it out or

chunk the word, using the appropriate hand gestures that the teacher had taught me. I

noticed that throughout the time the teacher would use a timer to signal that it was the

end of the rotation. Then, she would often ask if the students wanted two more minutes
and then set another timer. At one point, the teacher said, “freeze” and all students

dropped their writing implements and placed their hands on their heads.

Reflection

From this lesson I learned how hard it really can be to control students when each

of them need specific individualized help and have a difficult time working

independently or continuing independently after I got them started. I learned that timers

are very efficient in a classroom because then a teacher does not have to yell over the

students to gather their attention and the sound is a very clear and specific sound that it

cannot be missed no matter the noise level in the classroom. I also learned that it is very

important to make students feel successful because at this point in their education is it

primarily about identifying letters to their sound and not having the correct spelling for a

word.

This observation significantly helped me with my understanding of my capstone

topic of classroom management. I had seen timers used in classrooms before but never

one that actually rang loudly. Through observing this, I realized how this allows the

teacher and students to become immersed in their work and not have to worry about

paying attention to the clock. Another classroom management strategy I observed was

her use of the world “freeze.” This added to my knowledge of classroom management

strategies because I have hear this term used before, but only in a setting were the

children were being physical such as a PE class. I was very pleased to find out that it

could also be used effectively in a classroom setting.

This observation will affect me as a future teacher because it allowed me to see

how successful a classroom can be when the structure and classroom is set up from the
begging of the semester so that the students have clear guidelines of what is accepted. I

hope as a teacher I will be able to implement both the teaching strategies in my future

classroom. While I am aspiring to be a special education, I think that both of these

strategies would be beneficial to use in a special ed classroom.