For October 4

Describe an incident of working with a special child in your classroom.  What advice/guidance did you receive from your teacher or another school professional?

Due September 27

1. Talk about the brain research you read in relation to your own learning experiences in reading and mathematics.  

2. Do you think an emphasis on learning styles or multiple intelligences, adds to a teacher’s understanding of his or her students.

 

For Ruth

For Ruth: Along with the article we read about creating student interest surveys, I also took some tips from my supervising teacher as to what types of questions I should include when surveying the students. Along with her help, I came up with 4 questions for my student interest survey. I was surveying a total of 24 kids from our second grade class in Revere. The 4 questions I asked were: 1. How many people live in your house? 2. What is one thing you love to learn about? 3. Where is your favorite place to go? 4. What is your favorite food? The article we read stressed the importance of having a purpose for conducting student interest surveys. The purpose of the first question is to get to know a little bit about what our students’ home lives are like. The purpose of the second question is to get ideas about what topics/subjects students are particularly interested, so we can emphasize such topics/subjects for them whenever possible. The last two questions provide interesting facts about the students that we may have not found out had we not conducted an interest survey. Young kids really seem to enjoy answering questions about themselves like these. For the first question, “How many people live in your family?” nobody had less than 3 people living in their home. Most students (8) had 4 people living in their house, with the second most likely amount being 5. The highest number of people reported living in a student’s home was 13. For the second question, “What is one thing you love to learn about?” the most popular answer was math, with 8 children providing this answer. The second most popular were answers related to reading or books. After that, the most popular answers tied for science, animals and religion. For the third question, “Where is your favorite place to go?” varied answers were given. Despite the fact that the students answers varied I was able to group many of their responses into categories. For example, many of the students in our class are from countries outside the United States and many classify as English language learners (about two thirds of students). So, it makes sense that many students’ responses to this question were the countries they visit when they go to see family like, Morocco, El Salvador and Portugal. Other popular answers had to with amusement parks such as Canobie Lake Park and Six Flags. Another frequent answer had to do with playing outdoors at parks or playgrounds. And, naturally because many of these students live a stone’s throw to Revere Beach, going to the beach was among their favorite places to go. The last question, “What is your favorite food?” generated many different responses as well. The top 2 answers however, were pizza and chicken. There was a three-way tie for the second most popular answer being salad, hot dogs and meatballs. Other answers included foods such as couscous, nachos, pie etc…