Field Experience Reflection

Marquetta Strait April 15, 2013 EDUC: 422: Teaching Math to Children Mrs. Wright

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Marquetta Strait April 15, 2013 EDUC: 422: Teaching Math to Children Mrs. Wright

Field Experience Reflection

While completing my field experience for Teaching Mathematics to Children, I believe that I have grown professionally. I had the wonderful pleasure of being placed in Mr. Wingards fourth grade classroom at Mitchell Math and Science Elementary School located in Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. Wingard teaches the four core content areas to his class. He and his students were very welcoming and increased my desire to teach. This opportunity has allowed me to be able to experience a STEM-based school, gain math strategies to incorporate into my instruction, and gather resources. I was able to gain experience at this STEM-based school because I am in Claflin Universitys Learning Improvement for Future Excellence (CU L.I.F.E) program. While in this program, we travel to Mitchell Math and Science Elementary school once a week. There, we were assigned to a teacher for the ten-week program. While observing,we work with the students and teachers throughout the class period. We also attend math and science strategy sessions once a week. In these sessions, we discussed various strategies that we could

incorporate to improve out instruction in the classroom, such as Marzanos nine instructional

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strategies. In addition to the math strategies, we also discussed how to create lesson plans to make our lessons more organized. In my field experience classroom, I had an excellent time. My mentor teacher always kept the students engaged, incorporated higher order thinking activities, used contextual problems, and incorporated collaborative learning within the classroom. The following is an activity the students completed in class while learning about probability: In Mr. Wingards fourth grade class, the students were learning about probability. His anticipatory set was to first ask students if they played cards. He then asked the students to name some of their games, which were Tonk, Spades, and I Declare War. All of this information led up to his lesson. He wanted to know if the students knew the components of a deck of cards, such as there are 52 cards in a deck, four suits, and face cards. He then questioned the students on what were the fraction of red cards versus black cards in a deck and the fraction of each suit in a deck. The students were able to solve that each suit is one-fourth of the deck and that the red cards and black cards are each one-half of the deck. Mr. Wingard also brought up terms that the students had learned prior to the lesson that could be used when discussing probability, such as likely, impossible, and unlikely. The students created examples that went along with the vocabulary, such as it is impossible to pull a green card from the deck. After reviewing the components of a deck, he had the students to form two groups. I worked with one group and he worked with the other. For their activity, he had the students to use the chart and predict how many spades, heart, clubs, diamonds, or face cards that they will see. After the students predicted, I placed the deck of cards in a brown paper bag and had the students to pull a card out of the bag. On their worksheet, they were instructed to tally in the appropriate

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section on whether the card was a face card or an ace. Some of the cards allowed the students to tally more than once. Also, the students had a rectangle grid at the bottom of their worksheet to keep track of how many cards they viewed. After every five cards, I would say Group check. The group check was to make sure that all of the students were being attentive and had the correct amount of tallies on their chart. After each student pulled a card out of the bag, I then asked a series of questions on whether they believed the next card would be a face card or a number card, an ace or a heart, and a spade or a club. I did this to keep the students engaged and awaiting the unexpected in the cards. They noticed how long it took before we reached an ace of spades because the probability was slim.

Mr. Wingard acknowledges that lesson planning is a chore, but an extremely useful one if you use them to your advantage. His advice to me is that I should never plan too far in advance. I should allow my long range plans and state curriculum guides to assist me. Students should be assessed to identify any misconceptions, as well as mastery, before moving to unfamiliar or more challenging content. He uses lessons as a matrix to guide him through small group activities, texts, and materials that he uses on a weekly basis. The management of instructional materials gets confusing in an inclusion classroom setting where you teach all subjects, so his lesson plans serve to map out each content area and the constantly shifting instructional groupings within each area. Not only is instruction important in the classroom, but also, having a great social relationship with the students is essential to being able to keep a positive classroom atmosphere. Although I was only able to be in my field experience classroom for a few hours, I grew a great bond with his class. While with this class, I assisted Mr. Wingard by assisting and observing the students

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as they engaged in discourse with their fellow classmates. Being that the students were always engaged in Mr. Wingards lessons, he rarely had behavioral issues. The students wanted to h ear their classmates perspectives and reasoning. They would even ask their teacher if they could pose a question to their classmate on their classmates response. The students usually worked in groups and discussed math strategies they could use to solve problems. These strategies could be written down on sticky notes and later, be shared with the class. Lastly, I was able to gather resources that will be beneficial for my instruction. While working with the students, I was able to work with them and participate in their classroom activities. For instance, the students were taught problem solving steps by using a rap called Dr. QVOSAC. In this rap, it tells the students to question, visualize, operate, solve, answer, and check. This is a great strategy to use in the classroom to get students to comprehend that they have to use their critical thinking and reasoning skills while solving mathematical problems. There are many obstacles that I have to overcome as a future educator. I plan to do this by setting goals. I truly believe that my Teaching for Math course and my field experience has

definitely prepared me for the classroom. The purposes of the math portion of Common Core are for students to develop a good number sense, build their math background, and actually do mathematics. I believe that all of the mentioned factors in conjunction with obtaining a good education, being knowledgeable of issues of education, and maintaining to aid our youth will allow me to become a successful educator.