Living or Nonliving

This past week my group worked in the Kindergarten classroom at Brigham Elementary. We focused on deciding what is living and nonliving. My goal in working with the Bilingual students at Brigham is to find ways to challenge them. I also wanted to find ways to engage them in the activities. Additionally I wanted to become better at accommodating for them in the lessons. I feel like it has been hard to accomplish these goals or even gage how I am progressing because the activity from last week was just handed to me. I was not involved in the creating of it and therefore I was unable to make intentional accommodations to the lesson.  The only accommodations I was able to make were on the spot changes I felt necessary to make the lesson successful. I think I was able to accommodate when we were looking at the picture cards and I was aware of the language barrier and I tried to accommodate for it whenever possible. For some of the pictures the students didn’t know the proper term for the animal or object and I was able to give them simple terms that were more on their level. One of the pictures was of a dove and one student called it a chicken. Instead of talking about the dove we just called it a bird. This was helpful because adding a word last minute to their vocabulary might cause confusion. Additionally since our target is Science I wanted to let them focus on that and not be hindered by the literacy complication.

I wanted to challenge the students and I feel like I wasn’t able to do that with the activity given. However, I do feel that I was able to engage them in the activity. In our small group we took turns going around the circle deciding if the card was living or nonliving. I made sure that every student was getting a turn. Some students at the table were more talkative than others and I made sure the waited their turn and let their classmates participate. When I’ve been in a bilingual class before I’ve noticed that some students are too shy to participate and they get brushed under the rug. That was the justification for my goal because I saw that happen and I wanted to learn how to keep everyone engaged. When I do my lesson I will make sure there are elements where all students will be able to participate. I will also make sure that all students are encouraged to participate.

One of my steps to accomplish these goals is to get to know the students. Unfortunately the limited time we’ve had with these students has prohibited me from gaining the understanding I need to tailor my lesson to their needs. I think it would be more successful if every week we were able to work with the same small group of kids. That way we would build relationships with the students and learn more of their needs. 

Exceeds: Responded to two peer's blogs