Blog Entry 6
What strategies does the teacher use to actively engage the students? How effective are these?
Mrs. Nuttall has to be one of the best teachers I have ever been around. I love observing and being in her class room. She is a kindergarten teacher, so she has a hard job of making sure the students are engaged. Kindergartners loose focus very fast they have a short attention span. She has several strategies to make sure they are engaged and learning. The biggest one I can think of though, is that her lessons are short. In the beginning of observing I felt a little overwhelmed with how fast the class moved. The longest activity was centers or small group time (around 20 minutes) and even then they were switching centers and groups every 6-7 minutes. I asked her about this and she was able to help me understand. She explained that since their attention spans are short, she does short activities so that when they are in group time, guided reading, large group or math, they are focused and getting the most out it as they can be. She would also start new activities or lesson when the kids were cleaning up the last one, because it forced them to stay on task, because they new they needed to get to the next thing.
Mrs. Nuttall also taught me that as a teacher you much be super excited about everything you do, even exaggerator your excitement to help the kids focus. You cannot be monotone. Mrs Nuttall, is actually my neighbor and I have known her for years. I never knew how silly and excited and loud she could be until I saw her teach, because I had only ever seen her pretty quiet.
These last two things I want to write a out I think are the most important. She does a ton of small group activities where she is working with around 5 students and is able to really work with them individually and help them. I think this is the most important way to actively engage students, is to just create time where you directly work with each one, like in small group time. During all the small group time activities she has "self start" activities that the students know how to do with out her instruction. I think this really gives students responsibility. From what I have seen the self start is the "cool" thing to do for the kids. They all enjoy it and think it is cool, and that they are cool that they can choose a learning activity that they don't need someone telling them what to do all the time.
These are just a couple strategies I have seen. I have learned so much from observing and I am so exited to apply it when I begin teaching.
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