Rachel's Classroom 12/09

I spent the afternoon today in Rachel's Classroom. I was excited to watch her doing one of the lessons for her teacher work sample. When I arrived, I was excited to see that Rachel had arranged for a parent helper to come in for the lesson. The students are learning about maps and the lesson was centered on learning the 7 continents and characteristics of the continents. Rachel had created little booklets that the students took with them as they traveled around to 7 different stations. At each station there were books, artifacts and some type of video or audio for the students to view/listen to.

I was impressed with how Rachel had used technology in some form at every station. I got to work with two of the stations and do the technology component on the back computer. The students were interested in reading, viewing and hearing sound clips related to the 7 continents. Before the rotations began, Rachel taught her students a song that she found on teacher tube. The students loved it! I am going to post a link to the song on the sidebar.
Kinesthetic.

I can tell that Rachel does a lot of cooperative learning in her class because her students worked well in their groups. The students helped and supported one another and really did a great job of staying on task as they rotated around. At each station there were little cards with clues on them. The students had to open their booklet and guess the continent based on the clues. Then they had a list of tasks to do such as look at books, view artifacts, watch video clips, listen to sound files, etc. Then they wrote the actual continent.

I got to supervise two of the stations and it was a lot of fun. The students were so excited about the activities and were very engaged. They did a better job of filling out their booklets than I expected and the students seemed to really have a sense about the continents. For example, one student immediately knew that one of the stations was Australia simply by seeing a picture of a Kangaroo. Other students quickly identified Europe from a picture of the Eiffel Tower. This was interesting to me because the school where Rachel teaches has a high socioeconomic catchment of students. I wonder if this would have been the same in areas where students don't have as much life experience.

At this observation, I brought a digital camera and was able to take a few pictures. I will upload them later in the week.