3a Communicating with Students This subcategory helps me consider my student's learning styles and allows me to recognize that students learn differently and my approach with presenting material might need to be different at times. In the beginning of my teaching I was apprehensive with power points because I recognized early on that students who are not visual learners needed a hands-on approach. In my student teaching I have adopted an approach where I try to incorporate auditory learning, visual learning, and kinesthetic learning for each lesson. I use power points in a lot of science lessons because students need to develop the understanding that some things cannot be seen, touched, or heard (ie the solar system), but rather have to be learned from a visual perspective.
I often pair power points with music videos, a worksheet, or an experiment where the learning experience becomes authentic and hands on. I see a lot of value in combining the three styles of learning I incorporate in my lessons. Power points are a good way to introduce a lesson while outlining objectives and expectations for each lesson/unit. As a student teacher, I always have my own goals and objectives to reach when presenting material. Each lesson has a purpose and every moment is a learning moment for both student and teacher.
3c Engaging Students in Learning In this subcategory I have included a writing lesson that I created for my third grade English/Language Arts (ELA) classroom at Idaho Arts Charter School. The process of writing a lesson plan for paragraph writing was a challenge in and of itself; however, when I finished the lesson there was a sigh of relief and a feeling of accomplishment because I met and exceeded my goals. The powerpoint presentation I'm sharing was one that was presented across two days of instruction. For proper instruction of this difficult assignment, I allowed the pace of this lesson to consume two days. The first day consisted of direct instruction about paragraph organization and the creation of their first draft. Their first draft was completed with the help of a graphic organizer (shown below). Small student groups helped the students with innovation and peer editing. I was sure to spend time editing and encouraging the students to be more creative in their writing. On the second day, these writings were given back to them as a guide to polish up the final work. I also included a picture of one of the many very impressive writings.
3e Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness This artifact belongs in this subcategory because it is where I practice differentiation. At Purple Sage Elementary, my lead teacher (and other helpers/volunteers/parents) ran 4-5 stations during the entire reading block. The reading scores and abilities of each student placed them in a certain group. We only had two or three "low" students and the rest were pretty high readers. The first picture on the left shows the low group, the middle picture has the middle group, and the highest readers are on the right. The first two groups were given the same activity where they had to fill in the missing part of the word. This activity gave them extensive practice with vowels. I gave very step-by-step instruction to the low kiddos and guided them all throughout. I chose to increase the activity's demands for the middle group and had them working in partners. I did not guide this group as much, as they were self-starters and caught right on. In the picture on the right, the high students were asked to do a completely different activity where they had to find the rhyming riddle. After a couple weeks of getting to know the kids, I knew that the high group needed to move on from the basics and could start extending their critical thinking skills. Differentiation is one of my favorite parts about stations, because the activities are chosen/designed specifically for each individual student.