My 10 hours of outside observations are going to be fulfilled at Gesu Elementary in Mrs. Clary's 3rd grade class. Mrs. Clary has about 20 students in her class, which is relatively small, but she says that she actually enjoys it because it allows for her and the students to really get to know each other throughout the school year as they learn new things as 3rd graders.
For my first day of observations, I arrived at Gesu around 12:45 and the students were just getting back from recess. They came in and immediately sat down and begun to read books to themselves, not as a punishment or because Mrs. Clary made them but because this particular class LOVES TO READ. I thought this was amazing. Mrs. Clary later explained how they take Accelerated Reader tests (or AR's) after they read each book, which I actually remembered taking in my elementary school days. They are just simple 5-10 question tests on the content of the books to test how well the students comprehended and absorbed what the book was about. Each student sets a personal goal of how many AR's they take and how well they do on each test during each quarter, so the students are motivated to read as much as they can to achieve and beat their personal goal. From what I've seen, they really enjoy the challenge! What I think is also very impressive is how many AR books Mrs. Clary has in her room for the students to choose from. She has books for every genre and taste, reading level, and many different children's series. I think this is a fantastic system that really flourishes in Mrs. Clary's classroom because of how interested the students are and how they sort of taught themselves how to utilize down-time in the classroom by reading books that they enjoy to reach a goal.
Another interesting thing that I noticed about Mrs. Clary's classroom, is that there are different tasks assigned to different students each day. For example, on the first day I observed, students were receiving graded papers back so there were 3 "paper passers" assigned for the day that helped Mrs. Clary by passing back papers to fellow classmates. I observed that one paper passer was congratulating her fellow classmates when she noticed that they received a good grade on an assignment, which I thought was really cool. I think it shows the camaraderie that has been built among the students in the classroom, especially because most of them have been together since kindergarten.
After everything was passed out, Mrs. Clary led the students in a quiz game called "Cahoot" about safety because they had a test on it the next day. The kids really were intrigued by the game, however they were a little rambunctious at this time of the day and Mrs. Clary had to keep stopping and waiting until the students settled down, because it was affecting the concentration and the enjoyment of some students. Then, the students had to switch classrooms and they did not get to finish their game, because of how rambunctious they were, and the students realized this. I thought that this was extremely important because it teaches the students that they are in charge of their own learning, which is what our class just talked about with the DiGuilio Chapter in Educational Foundations. Mrs. Clary's 3rd graders are learning that their actions will affect their productivity, learning and ultimately success and they don't even realize it because they just think that they're playing a game and because they didn't utilize their time, they didn't get to finish.
Mrs. Clary's 3rd graders switched to the one of the other 3rd grade teacher's classroom to have social studies class. They were working on Native American Projects in this class where each student was assigned a Native American tribe to research by using books and printouts supplied by the teacher. They specifically researched different topics like the food and housing that their particular tribes utilize. They had to write paragraphs on each individual topic and then would eventually put all the paragraph together at the end. The social studies teacher helped them out by giving them an opening sentence to the paragraph to set up the purpose of the paragraph, but then the students were on their own to find relevant facts and to organize them in their own words and put them into a new paragraph. I helped some students proof-read and go over some of their paragraphs and some of the students near me were extremely intrigued with my life. They asked me lots of questions about my interests and what it's like to be in college at John Carroll. They were very creative and intelligent students. The final part of the project is a diorama of their particular tribe's house, made of only natural resources (no plastic). The students seemed to be really excited about this project and interested in the topic and being able to discover and find out information on their own. This reminded me of Freire's "Banking Concept of Education" in Educational Foundations because in this setting, the students were discovering for themselves. The teacher was not depositing all this information about Native American tribes into the students and the teacher did not appear to the students to know all about the tribes either. She seemed to be learning along with them when she would ask what the students had found out about their tribe. They felt like they were enlightening her, which is what Freire believes is the correct way of teaching.
The students switched for one last time to their English class where they were working on a haunted house story where the students plugged in descriptive adjectives and verbs to a pre-made story about an encounter with a haunted house. They made rough drafts, and then wrote their final drafts on a nice colorful sheet of paper. When they were done with their story, they got to draw out their haunted house and color it. The students were extremely intrigued by this project and I was impressed on how advanced their vocabulary was. I thought the assignment was a really cool way to allow students to be creative and also work on vocabulary and grammar at the same time.
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