Anti Bias Chap 2 Stop and Think Question and Answer

The question that I chose to respond to form Chapter 2 of the Anti-Bias Unit was :What is your earliest memory of realizing that some people were different from you and/or your family?

I can remember one day, I think I was in first grade, when I realized that there were some families that were different from my own. I realized this when I went over to one of my friend's house to play. We were talking about what we had done with our families over the weekend and my friend shared with me that she had gone over to her dad's house. I was shocked to hear that her parents did not live in the same house as mine did. I went home and discussed this with my mom, and she told me that my friend's parents had gone through a divorce. Before that moment, I had always assumed that everyone's family was like my own, and that everyone's parents lived happily together under the same roof.
I think that as early childhood teachers, it is important to understand that kids are dealing with a variety of differences within their families. It is important for teachers to be sensitive to this. Furthermore, it is important that the teacher helps children to understand that even though they may come from a different family background than other children did, they are just as important to the class as anyone else is.

St. Patty's Day with Ms. Martin's 1st Grade Class!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Today in Ms. Martin's class, Tiffany taught an awesome science lesson on the growth of plants. The kids loved the lesson, especially when we got to go outside to the school's garden to plant carrot seeds! I think that one of the best things about Tiffany's lesson was that she used a variety of methods to teach the lesson in order to adhere to the different learning styles of the students. Some of the ways in which she did this was to have an interactive power point presentation which she displayed on the Smart Board which was good do have for the visual learners. She also read a story to the class and discussed how it related to the lesson which was good for the audio visual learners. Then she had the class go out to the Garden and actually practice planting the seeds to make them grow, which was great for the tactile learners. I definitely think that she had the whole class engaged throughout her entire lesson.
Next week I will be doing my lesson on the colors of the rainbow, and I am very excited about it! ROY G BIV here I come!

Teaching my Language Arts Lesson

Today I taught my Language Arts lesson to Mrs. Miller's first grade class. I taught my lesson on defining key vocabulary words that were essential to know in order to grasp a better meaning of the text. The short story these eight words came from was called "My Robot." The text identified the words to be discussed by highlighting them in yellow. My job, as a teacher, was to appropriately define the words and present them to the students in ways that engaged them in learning vocabulary knowledge. I used several methods in my teaching to convey the definitions of the words to the students.
I started out my lesson by introducing the words from the text that we would be focusing on. I created an interactive power point presentation in which the words were creatively displayed and defined on the smart board. I was able to stop as long as I needed to during the power point to discuss the definitions of each word with the class. I also included a vocabulary review at the end of the power point in which I had fill in the blank sentences for the students to come up to the smart board and fill in the correct word for each sentence. The students really like being able to write on the smart board! Mrs. Martin also really liked how my presentation looked when the kids wrote in the blanks. She said the colors in the background of the slides I used really helped to magnify the colors of the smart board pens the students used to fill in the blanks. If I could change anything about my power point, I might make it a little bit shorter because I could tell that some of the students were starting to get fidgety towards the end of the presentation.
Next, I had the students pull out their reading books that contained the "My Robot " story and I explained to them that I would ask students to raise their hands to read a page of the story aloud. I asked the students to focus on the key vocabulary words we discussed and were highlighted for them in the text as they read. At the end of the reading, I went over the review questions that are found at the back of the stories. I noticed that the students seemed to really comprehend what was going on in the story from the answers they gave me.
Then I had the students do a matching vocabulary worksheet that I created. The students had to connect the word with the correct definition by drawing a line to it. Some students found this challenging, but I had to encourage them to think about the words and their meanings . In order to give early finishers something to do after they completed the worksheet, I had purposely made the worksheet on an 11x17 piece of paper which I folded in half to look like a book. The worksheet was on the front cover, and then when students opened it up I asked them to draw a picture of a robot they would like to have and write a few sentences using the vocabulary words discussed to either describe or tell a story about their robots. The kids really seemed to get into this , and I was most impressed by those who used the vocabulary words we discussed in their descriptions and stories of their robots. I asked if anyone would like to share their Robot stories and pictures to the class. All of the students eagerly volunteered to share their stories in front of the class.
The last thing I did was to orally ask students to tell me what the words meant as I asked them what the words definitions were aloud. I recieved good responses from the students who answered my questions.
Overall, I think this lesson proved to be a successful one in that the students were actively engaged in learning about the vocabulary words and their meanings, along with seeing how they themselves could use them in their own writings.