Observation 3

As I walked into the classroom, the students were busy with their creative writing. The students were writing a story about anything. One thing I noticed about my class is that they are unable to use their imaginations with writing. Usually, the writing will end up being short and straightforward. During the writing time, the students were focusing on writing techniques such as indenting and writing in complete sentences.

I noticed that our teacher does not allow the students to be off task at any moment. As soon as she notices that a student is off task, she will quickly call on them and asks them to focus on the task at hand.

More and more, I notice the gap among the students. Some students were finding compound words in a story while other students were writing creative stories.

We were able to observe part of math time, where the students were doing math centers. Most students were working on adding and subtracting, but a few advanced students would do multiplication flash cards. The four math centers were: Ice Age (adding/subtracting), Challenge 24, Close to 20, and Multiplication flash cards. The students would have 15 minutes at each station, where some stations were independent and two were monitored by the teacher and a volunteer. The students were getting excited about the games and became noisy. I noticed that the teacher did not like the noise and would quickly call the class to quiet down once it became too loud. I once heard that a loud classroom is good because the students are excited about learning.