On Thursday, February the 11th, 2016 I had the opportunity to teach a math lesson in my kindergarten practicum classroom.
In the past, I have focused more on teaching a standard- traditional lesson, where I explain the topic/ lesson and then get the students to work independently on a worksheet. However, this time, I really wanted to try something a little different. I had two reasons for this. One was, I want to try out different teaching approaches as I am preparing for the upcoming long practicum so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try something new, and the other reason was I want to try out different strategies that would be good for the ELL’s in my class. I wanted to try something that would help engage both ELL and non-ELL’s.
The lesson I taught was on 2D shapes. I had all the students sit on the carpet for the entire 40-minute lesson. I started off by reading out a storybook about 2D shapes to the students so they had a better understanding of what shapes are. I then had them find different shapes for me in the classroom and asked them questions about the shapes followed by having them make shapes out of pipe-cleaners. What I observed was that the ELL’s were listening to the book very carefully. They were participating and were really excited to make the shapes. In fact, even the few “shy-quiet” students seemed to be really engaged in this activity; a few were even helping some of the non-ELL students with finding shapes.
I think this lesson went quite well, especially for the ELL students. I will definitely do more “discussion types of lessons” for the long practicum.