Hicks_Observation Reflection

Joanne Hicks - Observation Reflection

 
On November 27th and December 6th I observed a third grade classroom during their Literacy Block.  There were 26 students in this classroom, five of which have IEPs.  The teacher, Mrs. Endicott is in her third year teaching third grade.  The classroom was very organized, with the classroom expectations posted at the front of the room.  Students were very respectful and there was an obvious positive and safe learning environment in place.  

The first lesson I observed was on character traits.  The teacher was using the story, Miss Rumphius to teach this content.  Students seemed to have a good understanding of the concept.  Although one students gave an example of a character trait being related to the persons appearance, Mrs. Endicott was very nice and questioned the students to redirect his thinking.  The student then changed his mind and said character traits were really related to how the person acts or how they handle situations.  He gave the example, if a person had to do something scary it would take courage, so courageous was a character trait.  I was impressed with the students vocabulary and understanding the meaning of the word courageous.  The teacher gave the students a quick formative assessment (I can card) an exit slip, she will use this data to help her drive her instruction during tomorrows lesson.  The teacher then split the students up into differentiated groups for literacy centers.  Each center had three levels of mastery, Mrs. Endicott had made modifications to the activities to meet the needs of each group. One of the centers incorporated technology, each student was able to work in Compass Learning a program that uses each student's MAP scores to design an individual learning path for each student.

The second day Mrs. Endicott was teaching the students about acrostic poems.  She wrote the word Holiday on the board and had the students brainstorm words that began with each of the letters in the word holiday. Student created a class acrostic poem for holiday.  Then Mrs. Endicott had the students work on their own acrostic poems using the word Christmas. It was fun to watch the students creating their acrostic poems, every student was engaged because they were excited about the topic of Christmas.  After all students were finished drafting their poem, she gathered all students up front on the floor and they had a poetry slam to share their pieces.  All students go to share and hang their work in the hallway to share. 

I enjoyed observing in Mrs. Endicott's classroom the third graders were very refreshing. I learned a great deal about teaching character traits and acrostic poems.  I also really liked the "I can card" she did in her classroom.  It gave the students the opportunity to show what they knew as well as gave her data to use in designing her lesson for the following day.  This formative assessment was not very time consuming and required little preparation. I definitely plan to implement this in my classroom in the near future.