Thursday, April 9, 2015
Observations about First and Fourth Grade
Having had a sufficient amount of time in both fourth and first grade at this point, I have seen very interesting differences between teaching in different grades (and very different schools!). I had always pictured myself in a younger classroom, and I was surprised by how much I liked working in fourth grade. The departmentalized structure made it a more manageable day, and the students were old enough to follow directions. The challenges in fourth grade were mostly related to finding appropriately challenging tasks to incorporate into my lessons, and TCAP stuff. I was excited to work in a first grade room where those issues were less prevalent. However, there are other challenges in a first grade classroom that are hard to explain until you have the experience of working in a kindergarten or first grade classroom. I love teaching reading and I really love the content in the first grade curriculum, however, the management in the younger grades is a whole other ballgame. The students need explicit directions for every single thing they need to do, not just academic tasks, and they need directions repeated often. They can't all read, so written directions or written assessments are time-consuming and only helps some students. I am much more used to how to address these challenges now, but when I first got to my second placement, I struggled to adjust to this change and spoke to my MT often about designing appropriate tasks. What other differences have you all noticed between the older and younger grades? Does anyone have any helpful advice for adjusting to new grade levels?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I definitely understand the huge mentality switch when planning lessons for different grade levels. I switched from 6th grade to 2nd grade. Planning for 2nd grade was a big challenge at the beginning. I needed to slow all of my lessons down. This was really hard for me at the beginning because I like to be more concise and it took me a while to slow down my explanations. I needed to start repeating myself more, reviewing more frequently, and adding in longer, more complex explanations. I noticed the first week that quite a few of my lessons were too hard for the students. I thought that a lot of their math lessons were very boring, so I tried to add in more critical thinking or problem-solving problems. However, my students became confused and sometimes frustrated because they were too difficult. These first few lessons showed me how much I needed to slow everything down for my younger students.
ReplyDeleteOne other difficulty I have planning for younger grades is including authentic activities. Since students are learning basic ideas, such as addition, subtraction, or when to use commas in a series, I have a harder time planning real-life or authentic activities. When teaching grammar in 6th grade we would go over examples, do a class activity, and then use the grammar in writing to practice actually using adjectives or contractions. My 2nd grade students do not write very often, and I could not expect them to whip out a paragraph using 5 contractions or commas in a series. It would take us a significant amount of time to write a few sentences. Also, during math we do a lot of practice with math facts. I don’t like the focus on speed, but students do need to be able to do basic addition and subtraction problems quickly. So I’m still not sure how to balance authentic activities and basic skills practice when teaching younger grades.
I definitely understand the huge mentality switch when planning lessons for different grade levels. I switched from 6th grade to 2nd grade. Planning for 2nd grade was a big challenge at the beginning. I needed to slow all of my lessons down. This was really hard for me at the beginning because I like to be more concise and it took me a while to slow down my explanations. I needed to start repeating myself more, reviewing more frequently, and adding in longer, more complex explanations. I noticed the first week that quite a few of my lessons were too hard for the students. I thought that a lot of their math lessons were very boring, so I tried to add in more critical thinking or problem-solving problems. However, my students became confused and sometimes frustrated because they were too difficult. These first few lessons showed me how much I needed to slow everything down for my younger students.
ReplyDeleteOne other difficulty I have planning for younger grades is including authentic activities. Since students are learning basic ideas, such as addition, subtraction, or when to use commas in a series, I have a harder time planning real-life or authentic activities. When teaching grammar in 6th grade we would go over examples, do a class activity, and then use the grammar in writing to practice actually using adjectives or contractions. My 2nd grade students do not write very often, and I could not expect them to whip out a paragraph using 5 contractions or commas in a series. It would take us a significant amount of time to write a few sentences. Also, during math we do a lot of practice with math facts. I don’t like the focus on speed, but students do need to be able to do basic addition and subtraction problems quickly. So I’m still not sure how to balance authentic activities and basic skills practice when teaching younger grades.