Jenny Kraft’s 5th grade classroom at Whittier International Elementary School - 2 hours
Melodee Strong Shadowing at Simpson Housing - 1.5 hours
Jenny Kraft’s 5th grade classroom at Whittier International Elementary School - 2 hours
This Tuesday at Whittier I observed part of a lesson. The class is currently working through a Powerpoint tracing aspects of the revolutionary war. Ms. Kraft’s class occasionally is joined by another teacher and a student shadow who’s graduating from the University this year. The class is so big that just the presence of more teachers really helps everyone stay engaged in group discussions. The teachers are using a method of introducing new information by having students recall past lessons or relevant information, then guiding them through reading and copying new information into a structured set of graphically organized subcategories in their personal notebooks. Students often learn using technology, but they usually don’t retain the information as well, so Ms. Kraft and the other teacher are trying to help them learn how to write information in an organized way that helps them remember the content and make notes easy to access for future studying.
This Thursday at Simpson Housing students were finishing the projects they started last week. My shadowing of Melodee isn't finished yet, but I feel like I've already seen a lot of important methods of getting kids to engage with art when that isn’t a frequent aspect of their lives. Melodee conducts a balance between getting them to do something new without controlling them too much. Their only expectation is to exercise creativity, not to achieve a set standard in a new technique. It will be interesting to see if they engage in any assessment or reflection, or if the creation itself will stand on its own as the goal of the project.
Friday at Whittier continued the structure of the Tuesday lesson, but the really fun stuff happened in the morning before that part of the day began. The students of Whittier are beginning a month of fundraising and reading. I don’t know the details, but it involves encouraging the family and community of the students to give a donation per the number of hours a given student reads per month. As part of this the whole school had some sort of pep rally. It was fascinating to see how earnestly excited students of all ages got about parents dressed up in silly costumes encouraging them to be “super readers.” I don’t often get to see kids in an environment where they can be unabashedly excited about something silly and entertaining, and it was nice to see so many students just able to have a half hour of loud, smiley nonsense.