Field Visit 1--October 11th, 2007

Morning Routine
When the children came into the classroom, Ms. C had a SmartBoard set up with instructions of certain tasks they needed to perform before their morning meeting. She had explained to us that she shares the SmartBoard with other teachers, so if she does not have it that day, she would just write the tasks on the board. The morning message starts with a greeting in another language. This particular time was "Guten Tag". She then continued to ask them to fulfill three different tasks. They had to grab their journals and sit at the "u" shaped table where she had 5 lemons sitting on the table. They were asked to write down 3 observations about the lemons. The next task they were asked to perform was to finish making their posters on safety rules for scientists. This was a paired assignment and from the other activities she told Lauren and me about, she likes to get the children paired with different partners to get them familiar and friendly with all of their peers. Their last morning task was to watch a "Brain Pop video" about the scientific method on one of the computers. She had explained that these tasks did not need to be done in any specific order, just go wherever there was room permitting. All of the children had arrived and most were done with their morning tasks around 8:45. The only children who didn't completely finish were those who came from breakfast and had arrived a little later than some of the other children. For the ones that didn't finish, she promised them that they would have time at another point during the day to finish their tasks.

After she gathered everybody together, she had them sit in a circle for their "morning meeting". They started off the meeting by using their newly learned, foreign language greeting to greet their peers to their right and to their left until everybody in the circle was greeted. Ms. C then introduced me and Lauren and gave the children time to ask us questions so that they would feel more comfortable about who we are and why we are there. After we were introduced, she continued by having the child assigned as the "schedule person" to read the day's schedule to the class and they moved on from there.

The Classroom
The classroom was set up in a cooperative learning environment. From the way the desks were arranged, you could tell that Ms. C was encouraging peer to peer learning. When one of the children was having trouble reading the morning message, he didn't even ask Ms. C for help, he immediately asked one of his peers and you could see that is the environment she is aiming to establish. She had 5 groupings of student desks. 2 of the groups had 4 students and the other 2 groups had 5 students for a total of 18 students. She had the "U" shaped table toward the front of the table next to their common meeting area. Around the classroom, she had a lot of things with their names on it including weekly jobs, behavioral things and things of that nature.

Social Studies lesson
For the classes social studies lesson, they had a teacher come in who was part of the gifted education program at their school. The class had been working on different types of maps and she came in to introduce different kinds of maps to them. One of the maps had the countries sized differently depending on their population (for example, the US was the third largest country because we have the 3rd largest population). Another was an upside down map which was described as a map that might be better for people who live in Australia to look at because when the map is upside down, Australia is top and centered. The third map was a butterfly map which had the map just cut differently. And finally, the fourth map had Mecca in the middle and she explained the story of that. From there, each student had to grab their journal and write down observations. Ms. C had written out an example of how to set up their papers so that all the children would have an easier time recording their observations. She had them make 4 rows and number them to correspond with the numbers on the map. After they were all done, they had shared some of their observations and which map they liked the most supported by why they liked it more than the other ones. The visiting teacher then gave stickers to people she felt put in a good effort and explained to them that even if they do not always get the correct answer, they need to work hard, so she rewarded those who she felt worked diligently the whole time.

Classroom Management
Initially, I felt that Ms. C seemed a little harsh, but as more children entered the classroom, I not only understood her tactics but really valued her strategies. She did not want the students to rely on her for anything. If they asked her a question such as "Ms. C, what are we supposed to do?" she would say "I'm not going to answer that, either ask one of your peers or think about what we do every morning." Another behavioral thing I saw that I really thought was great was that at the table where they were to make observations on their lemons, she had taped 5 boxes on the table in front of each chair. This was to symbolize the number of people allowed at the table. This way, she could say "if there is no open box then you shouldn't be at the table". At first, I didn't really understand why she did it but then I realized that kids could easily bring their chair over and then they would have a seat there, but in this case, if they didn't have a box, then they should be working on a different task. Another thing I noticed in the classroom in regard to behavior was on one of their closets. She had little pockets with all the kids names on them. Then she had pink, yellow, blue , red, and orange strips of paper at the bottom with a key of what they meant. Pink was nice work, yellow was a 2 minute time out, blue was a 5 minute time out, red was a call home and orange was a referral. If a child had done something really well, they would get a pink piece of paper in their pocket, and same thing if they did something wrong.

She also strongly encouraged them to solve their own conflicts with each other. One of the little boys, S, came up to her and said that E stole his seat. Instead of walking over and approaching E, she simply said "Well S, did you talk to E about it?". S immediately turned around and they settled it together. I never saw her have to solve a confrontation on her own. All of the students were solving it amongst themselves.

Finally, another thing I had noticed was that when some of the children who had gotten there earlier finished their morning tasks, they quietly took out books and started reading. They did this without a beat which show me that she must have implemented and really stressed certain behaviors so that they never question what they should be doing. Many of the children were completely independent until their morning meeting which I definitely give credit to Ms. C's implementing rules and expectations from the beginning.