April Theory in Practice Connections

April has seen to just come and go! With Spring Break taking up a week of our time together, I was nervous that my students would fall behind in this month, however, they surprised me so much with how far they have come! It's just very rewarding as an educator to see students who came in not even speaking have full on conversations about their learning and being very excited to share what they know to others. I am just honored to have had a helping hand in helping my little people blossom. I think that this month I was trying to make learning as fun and hands-on as possible also while trying to be culturally responsive to my students various backgrounds. I also have been trying to focus more on letting students take control of their own learning. The challenges I have been experiencing is their age level and them not necessarily knowing how to take ownership of their learning and looking to me for directions and answers all at once. I've been attempting to introduce strategies to show them just how powerful they can be even for little people.

I big subject that I really wanted my students to do more of this month was science. As I was going over the standards and everything we've covered so far. I noticed that they have had very little opportunities to really build their scientific thinking and act as scientists so I wanted to make sure that they got the opportunity to do just that.

                                                                

Recording the life cycle of a butterfly                                                        Experimenting with electricity

It was so great really engaging with a topic that they don't get explicitly taught as much and really being interested in the content.

In doing the Digital Storytelling Project, exploring my students' communities was also a big challenge for me as well mainly because my students do not come from the safest of neighborhoods. However, as I reflected when piecing the project together, I really that there are so many strengths that my students possess just by being a resident of their neighborhood and there is also value and knowledge that they bring with them to the classroom as a result of it. I wanted to expand upon this and let my students be able to see themselves and their communities within the realms of our classroom.

                                

I think that our classroom community has grown so much as a result of these projects! I am extremely excited to see how much further we will go together as we continue to learn and grow. By the same token, it saddens me to know that I only have one more month to make a lasting impact on these phenomenal students' lives. I am doing my best to make the most out of my time left with them and can't wait to witness their growth in the end.

March Theory in Practice Connections

March was definitely a month of growth for both myself and my students! I think collectively we learned so much about ourselves and what we could do individually and as a class! I can definitely say that this month was really centered on strategies around building students conceptual knowledge of mathematics as well as get them really thinking about their thinking. I can't believe how far we've come together and yet how close we are to the end. However, considering our late start I think that we've been making remarkable strides.

The biggest challenges that we were seeing in the classroom this month were getting friends to get along with one another and really learn how to show empathy towards each other. I remember discussing in our psychology class about how understanding the feelings and emotions of others can be a difficult trait to grasp for four-year-olds because most of them are still in that preoccupational stage. I really learned to leverage Bailey's text as a guide for a lot of strategies to help my students learn to be caring towards how they make others feel.

I think one of the coolest and most memorable lessons that we had during the month of March was watching my students learn to decompose numbers which I thought would be really difficult for them to grasp at first but they rocked it. I taught them all of the different ways to decompose numbers and then I let them explore with these different methods in their math stations.

They could find it in books!  

Build it!

Make it in the ten-frame!

Draw it on the number line!

And use the geoboards to make it!

Watching my kids actively engage in these math centers made me so very proud to watch! The only thing that didn't go as well as I would have liked for it to was the transition to the different centers the first time we engaged in the activity mainly because they were so eager to try all the centers because they were so excited! However, I can tell that students actually learned from these engagements because the assessments to follow up were remarkable.

      

My little people definitely surprised me with all of the great things that they were able to accomplish in mathematics and the biggest thing that I learned was when work is fun, engaging, relative, and hands-on to students, that is truly when they learn the best and are more likely to retain knowledge. Now my kids can spot the number four out a mile away no matter what form it comes in!

Can't wait to see where April brings us! :-)