Practicum II Lesson Plan 2 Reflection
My second observation for my P2 placement took place on Wednesday morning from 8:45-9:45. This incorporated the majority of the Opening as well as part of the first rotation of stations. One of my previous growth focuses was transitions and keeping students engaged. I specifically have been focusing on this within the classroom, and was able to practice this during Opening as we transitioned from calendar, to song and dance, to sitting down, and to vocabulary cards at the end. I feel like I have grown tremendously in this area as I have had practice, gained confidence, and gathered tools specific to Kindergarten. We are currently focusing on skip counting within the curriculum, and Margie and I discussed this before my Opening so I made sure to integrate skip counting as much as possible through song, movement, and repetition. I also discussed with Margie before my Opening about making content more accessible to students and therefore I focused on making the vocabulary words within the vocabulary story cards more visual for students, specifically ELL students.
You and I discussed how all of the activities that I engaged kids with on the carpet integrated multiple content standards as well as had students practicing essential social and behavioral cues. We also discussed how kids were a little bit more wiggly near the end of carpet time, and it took longer to bring them back to being quiet listeners. I felt that the story didn’t capture the students attention enough and therefore I had to combat that by allowing students to constantly express their reactions to the content through asking for volunteers to share their thoughts, voting on certain pictures, having students react through quiet sign language, and having volunteers come to the board to underline vocabulary. We also discussed that I can focus on the behaviors of kids during my time in Kindergarten, and start to analyze the connections between the antecedents of student behaviors and how they are connected to the actual behavior itself. We discussed how I can focus on challenging and approaching difficult student behaviors in different ways in order to discover specific ways that students react with well in order to positively modify their behavior.