Observations

For my third observation, I was at Wolf Springs Elementary School with Mrs. Holsapple.  Mrs. Holsapple teaches third grade. I was in Mrs. Holsapple's classroom for two and a half weeks. When I was in Mrs. Holsapple's classroom, I observed their math whole group lesson, math small groups, and writer's workshop. I really appreciated the way Mrs. Holsapple designed her class to be like a family, where everyone respects each other while having fun.

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For math class, Mrs. Holsapple divided the time between whole group and small group math. Whole group math featured a new skill that none of the students have learned before. A lecture with examples was taught, and then there was time to practice those problems alone. For small group math, the students were assigned "choice boards" every week with 10 different math activity options on it. The choice boards are custom to the student's math pretest for the unit, building on what they know and introducing concepts they don't yet know. Students must do two choice board activities and then they have activities they can choose to do when finished, such as working on flashcards or reading a book. Everyday after math, the students participated in Writer's Workshop. Mrs. Holsapple would give the students a prompt to write 6 sentences about, such as "Do you love winter? Why or why not?". By doing this, students are able to expand on their writing skills. Writing every day helps students become much better writers, are well as improve handwriting.

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When in Mrs. Holsapple's class, I got the opportunity to teach an English lesson. I chose to cover a lesson on making summaries. This lesson plan can be viewed in my observations tab. I decided to cover a lesson on this because I noticed that the students were copying down text and substituting a few words when they were supposed to be summarizing the information they learned. In this lesson, I did a whole group introduction and explanation of summarizing by using video clips. After learning what a summary is, students were given a worksheet "Give me Five" learning guide to write a 5 sentence summary about baboons using an article from their reading magazine.

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The most common behavior in the classroom was students being off task and talking when their voice was supposed to be off. Mrs. Holsapple did a great job of managing the behaviors in her classroom, especially since she had 27 third graders. She was stern with her students when they were off task or misbehaving, and gave lots of positive praise when they were following directions. Wolf Springs also utilizes a school-wide voice volume guide. The guide is level 0 through level 4, level 0 being voices off and level 4 being an presentation voice. T​his helped all the students know what voice level they should be at when in different environments, preventing behaviors from occurring. 

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I loved witnessing the connections students made with each other in the classroom. They were also very comfortable with Mrs. Holsapple and engaged in her teaching. The students were very welcoming to having me in the classroom, and even invited me to play with them at recess most days. I am very thankful for the time I had observing in Mrs. Holsapple's classroom, and I learned a lot about what it would look like to be an elementary general education teacher.