Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Blog Entry #2

Service Learning Experience in Learning Strategies:

Mrs.  Wilcox, the teacher I am observing seems to use the theory of Constructivism the most.  She is a Kindergarten teacher at Franklin Elementary school in Provo.  I've seen many examples of her using active student learning to teach a concept.  For instance, they are learning their ABC's and at the beginning of the day she has them sing a long to a song to teach them the letters and the sounds.  At the end of the day, she has them do a dance to the ABC's with various different actions to help them remember.  Each child apparently came up with an action for the letters on the first day of school. Today she also implemented visual learning and/or language learning skills in that she counted their numbers from 1 to 5 with them while moving pictures and having one or two volunteers come up to move the pictures as well while they counted.

Mrs. Wilcox addresses the learning development and different learning strategies in her class by having centers.  By implementing centers she is teaching the same concept but with many different activities that engage her students in different ways.  For example, she has them go on a hunt for different letters around the classroom in one center.  In another center she had them building these letters with blocks, magnets, or drawing the letters with paint.  Lastly in a final center, she had them reading the letters to a teacher and then sorting them underneath pictures that started with the same letter.  She also makes her above mentioned Constructivism interactive, but not too complicated for the students to grasp at their age and with their attention span.

I think she does a very good job varying her ways of instruction and I found that the kids respond to it as well.  One student who really struggled in one center did astonishingly well in the next.  It was a perfect real life example of different learning styles taking effect.

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