FieldBlog 1

In our first school observation we went to Boulevard Elementary School. It was an open school, which was a completely new concept to me. I had never heard of one, none the less been in one or observed how one of them would have worked. The idea was very interesting to me, open schools had no walls which could create for a very stimulating setting, or in which there were unrelenting interruptions creating problems with nose from classrooms all over the building. If a certain classroom was loud or even just a single student were too loud the noise could be heard through the whole building. But the students in the classrooms where we observed did tend to work very quietly and did not create as much of a problem with sound that i would have thought it would be. They actually handled themselves very well for young children. There were often loud noises coming from classrooms nearby and the students would not even flinch at the sound. The students were very well behaved and would just keep working and ignore the sounds that were coming from the other room. When I was younger there is no way that I could have done this. Even in my high school we had walls in every room, but if there was something loud coming from a different room everyone would get distracted and off the subject at hand, sometimes even the teachers.The school was also a STEM school, which means that they specialized in science, technology, engineering, and math. Which is also an interesting addition to the school because it puts students on a track at such an early age before they can decide for themselves what kind of career path that they would like to be on. In most cases tracking in schools is not a positive thing for students. It labels students and puts them on tracks that effects the ways that they are educated.

In the first classroom my group observed a class of third graders. In the classroom the desks were put into groups of four or five spread out all around the room, When we came in the students were preparing to start a reading lesson. They read sentences off of a packet and certain words in the sentences were italicized. After the students had read all of the sentences the teacher asked the class one at a time what each word meant.The students had to use context clues and the knowledge they had to try to understand the meaning of each word. If the students did not know the meaning of the word the teacher would guide them with the help of other students to find the correct meaning of the word. She used examples using the word in different ways to help explain to the students.This lesson seemed to be very effective. The only problem that i saw in this classroom was that the teacher seemed to miss an entire group of students during this activity. Their group of desks sat in the corner of the room and the teacher lost track of them because she was standing in front of them and they did not get any involvement in the activity.

In the second classroom, which was also a third grade class, the desks were rows but at the time the students were not sitting in any of the desks. There was only about eight students in he classroom with the teacher at the time and they were broken up into four groups. Each student had a partner and they were working around the classroom towards the edges with each other in an activity. They were playing a game against one another to match two half's of a sentence to make one complete sentence. The game was very engaging and kept the students attention very well. They seemed to love it, each of the students seemed eager to learn more and more. It was extremely nice to see so many students so excited to learn. The teacher went around working with each of the groups helping the students if they needed it checking to make sure they did not need any help. She was also very eager to teach they students. It was a great vibe in the room there was so much excitement to learn going back and forth form the teacher to student.

The third classroom that we observed  was a second grade class. When we walked in the teacher was reading a story to the class, but the story did not have any words. It was just a picture story which was very cool. The students looked at the pictures and put words to the story themselves. It was fun to watch students this young put their own words to a story and make it their own. The activity was very engaging the students were all paying attention and participating in class. Again the students were very eager to learn and participate in class.

The last classroom that we say that day was a fifth grade classroom. The desks in the room were arranged into groups of four or five. The activity that they were doing at the time was a game classifying species of animals. Each table had a set of cards and everybody was participating in the game. The students worked with one another to help each other learn if they did not know the correct way to classify the species. The activity was very engaging, it let the students help one another with the subject at hand. There was a lot of group work in all of the classrooms. This was very good because students are often too scared to ask the teacher a question and it is good to have peers around that can help them out.