Blog Entry 2

The responsibilities of a Kindergarten teacher seem endless! 

Every day you have to have lessons planned for your class in many different subjects.  Math, writing, reading, p.e., and more.  Fairly often the teacher has to give assessment tests to each child individually.  There are parent conferences which can be very time consuming.  Sometimes there are concerns or special needs where the teacher has to contact a child's caregivers on their own time to discuss the issue.  Every week homework turned in has to be graded and recorded, and the new homework sent home. And of course before sending it home it has to be prepared and put together! 

At the school where I'm observing, each grade level's teachers form a team and everyone has team duties. It could be ordering and dividing lesson material, preparing homework for coming weeks, recess duty, or any number of other things.

The teacher I am observing right now also has a student teacher in her classroom so on top of all of her regular responsibilities she has even more!  I believe she attended a meeting at UVU regarding her student teacher last week and she also observes and gives comments and suggestions to the lessons the student teacher gives.

This past Monday she had to attend a district OEK (optional extended-day Kindergarten) meeting as she is teaching OEK at her school.  She is also honored to have been selected by Alpine School District to attend the Reading Recovery Conference in Columbus, Ohio, Feb. 1-5.  Today she was filling out a paper for each day she was going to be gone.

There are so many more duties that I haven't mentioned, and surely even more than I don't even know about yet, but this does not scare me away from wanting to teach.  The positive difference you can be in a child's life is well worth it all.  Think of Ruby Bridges and her year at school where it was only herself and her teacher, Mrs. Henry.  What a wonderful relationship came out of that situation!  Even in the midst of a great trail many blessings came to pass.

I have not been a stranger to trial in my life, and the duties and responsibilities of being a teacher, while great, are worth the end result.

Blog Entry 1

I've been working in a Kindergarten classroom and have noticed some developmental differences among the children. After learning about different learning modalities, or learning styles, I think some of the progress, or lack of progress is a result of children having different learning modalities.

It seems like a majority of the children have a visual learning modality, auditory learning modality, or a combination of both. These children seem to easily pick up on new concepts and learn new information quickly, due to most of the teaching being visual or auditory.

For example, one student who I will call "John" is behind all the other students in his knowledge and skills. I now wonder if it has to do with his learning modality. He has not yet completely mastered all of the letters in the alphabet. Sometimes during classtime we will pull him to the side of the classroom to give him extra help. During this time we do a system of multisensory activites with him. For each lowercase letter in the alphabet there is a bag of activites all of which are done several times before moving onto the next one. In the bag for the letter 'a' there is a textured foam letter that John traces with his finger in the proper direction while saying, "Around, up, down, A." Next there is a piece of black construction paper with the letter written in white crayon and starting point marked with a round sticker. He traces this while again saying aloud the directions. Then he does the same thing but in a tray of sand. In the second to last step a semi-transparent sheet of paper is placed on top of cardstock printed with 2 rows of the letter and John traces all of them. Lastly he is asked to point to the letter 'a' on a page in a small book.

The work seems to be paying off as he now only has 3 letters left that he cannot name on sight.