Field Visit #3 - 10/19/06

I was once again impressed with my first grade class visit this week...especially their growing knowledge of sign language! The first thing I looked at was student involvement. The students in this class are all very anxious to volunteer and participate in class, so I never saw a time that it was hard to get an answer. A majority of the students wave their hands enthusiastically whenever the teacher asks a question. There was even debate over who got to be tested first! To keep things even for the students who may not have volunteered as much, the teacher was very careful to call on people she hadn't heard from yet that morning. She would sometimes call directly on a child if they hadn't volunteered yet to make sure everyone was involved.
As far as routines go, I often feel like the entire class/day is one big routine. The class is on a schedule that the students know very well and have no problem following. When the students come back from specials, they have calendar time. This time is especially "routined," starting with the date and a pattern they are working on, moving onto filling in charts and graphs for the day, weather, number of days of school, filling in straws as counters, working with the clock, counting on an abacus by 1s,2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 8s, 9s, 25s (changing each day a little bit), and working on sign language and Spanish. The class then moved to math time, with the teacher's same transition into new activities.
This week there was very little disruption or misbehavior. There were some gentle reminders not to block the walkway during calendar time on the rug. At one point the class did start talking a bit among themselves, so the teacher said I can't hear the person speaking or I hear whispering...waited, and then started using names of those students still talking to calm them down. In the past she has also used names to call out people who were not paying attention or were misbehaving.
I spoke with the teacher about some potential lesson ideas to teach the class, and came up with a few, but we are planning on talking more about this over the next week. The ideas so far are to do a logic game, which the students sometimes do as a part of calendar time transitioning into other math lessons, to do a writing activity with a book (perhaps a fairy tale, which is a genre they've been working with this month), or a science lesson on force and motion (which would be based around push and pull for first grade). We initially thought we'd be teaching a few math lessons since we are always in class for math, but the teacher said it was fine if we change the schedule for a few days, and that the kids might actually like to do that. I really liked those three ideas, and think that we can make a few good lessons with those.