As I arrived at Tisdale Elementary School on October 25th, I met my field placement in the class room and we talked about different ways of knowing and how it is important that we always apply them to our classrooms. The first way of knowing that I noticed he applied to the class is reason. Examples of reason were shown through many different ways, but in particular being rewards. Reasoning behind why they should be rewarded or the reward should be taken away based on their class manners, listening skills, and workload. As soon as the grade four students took their seats in the morning both Mr. Yee and I noticed that they were filled with energy and were not giving him the attention needed for a learning environment. As the clock ticked and rewards were taken away from them, we needed to take the appropriate action to have the students become calm and controlled. To do so, we took ten minutes of our time and devoted it towards a session on the website named ‘Headspace’. This website offers meditation that is focused on a certain problem you may be experiencing. This day we participated in a meditation session created for focus, which made us become aware of our breaths, keeping our mind focused instead of wandering, and making the classroom completely quiet and soothed.
Teachers promote knowledge in the classroom in many ways, one I have already mentioned being rewards. Another way of promoting knowledge that I experienced on Thursday was leading by example. For students to fully understand, teachers make and create examples so that the job can be done properly and complete grade four level work as expected. Since Halloween is quickly approaching, we had art class in the morning and were painting night time portraits. Before we began, we had the students gather around the nearest table to explain to them how to properly paint, clean up, and take action upon their project. Many teachers rely on their own websites that they have found, along with other teachers in their school to partner up with and help them create lesson plans together. They also rely on connection with their students since young students need that type of support as well to help them fully develop and understand. Many teachers spend hours, even days, searching for plans and activities that work best for them, for example, Mr. Yee had searched for different books that contained methods of teaching, applied and suggested different websites and other books that would be useful to the rules/ assignments that the book contributed, and saw what worked best or him and his classroom, and continued to apply it to the curriculum.
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