It was so good to visit in classrooms yesterday, and I enjoyed my visit at Keowee Elementary.As you exit the school's main office, you can see a list of targets established by teachers for 2011 in the hallway. I like that they’ve established targets from themselves rather than resolutions. Resolutions seem to get broken, and targets continue to be goals even if they are not reached. The goals of the teacher included personal, professional, and student-oriented goals.
Based on my observations, I believe all of the students were excited to be returning from our inclement weather days. They seemed excited and enthusiastic about learning. It was even hard from them to contain their enthusiasm in the first grade classrooms I visited.
I entered a first grade classroom. The students were developing posters for lost items. They each had created a unique paper cut-out mitten that had been placed on the bulletin board. They were going to develop a poster similar to one for a lost dog. The teacher modeled one with an imaginary missing three-legged dog, and then modeled the activity with her own lost mitten. The kids worked hard to identify unique aspects of the “lost” mitten (three hearts, color, etc.). The teacher recorded the information, and then the students were off and ready to develop their own “lost” poster. It was a fun activity that required the use of adjectives. I know they had fun later trying to identify each mitten from the posters they developed.
I entered another first grade classroom. The students were busy framing sentences. They reordered words, placed punctuation marks, and looked for capital letters. I loved that the teacher and students used words like similes and metaphors as they talked about the examples. The students even used the word “hexagon” in response to a sentence describing a snowflake's shape. I was impressed with the level of thinking; for instance, a student quickly pointed out how to rephrase the words to form a question. There was lots of energy and thinking in the classroom.
My final visit was in a fifth grade class. The teacher was using some pull-out time to work with smaller groups of her students. The teacher worked with a small group of girls on the game “I have/Who has?” (follow the link for the full book of activities via Google) that used prefixes and root words. While the teacher was working with this small group of girls, and equal number of boys were at the back working with SuccessMaker. All students were hard at work and on task. I enjoyed seeing how this teacher used the time creatively to work with students on specific skills.
I enjoyed my visit at Keowee. I was excited to see the students back in school, and I think the students were excited to have returned, too. Good luck on reaching those targets!
