Tools for Teaching Chapters 1-4

In response to Mrs. Kallas' blog post on Fred Jone's Tools for Teaching book study here are the answers to a few questions.

Chapter 1
I think that the quality of teachers has some factor in the students, but it is not the single most important factor in a student's success. A child could have the best teacher in the world, but without the support at home, ability to focus and basic background information on the topic they would not be able to succeed. A child's success begins at home. I have seen this play out over and over again with my kids in my site school.  You can typically tell which kids have a good support system and which kids don't. On the other side, just because you are an A+ mom doesn't mean you are going to have an A+ kid. One of my favorite after-school care families has a daughter who is struggling with reading because she is dyslexic. Her mom is one of the best moms that I have seen and she is doing everything she can to make sure her daughter can succeed. I have no doubt that with the support of her mom, this child will succeed.

Chapter 2 

As an adult, you see a child struggling and sometimes you forget how it was to sit in that chair and learn all of this information for the first time. When I help a kid the first thing I do is see how much they know. Right now in third grade they are learning about time intervals, so like "Sally got to school at 8:05. She has a 10 minute bike ride and it takes her 37 minutes to get ready for school, what time did Sally wake up?" My third graders are really struggling with this concept, but for me its not that hard. The first thing I would say would be, "how do you think we should start this problem?" They either know how to start it or they don't know. From there I watch them do it and give them guidance from there. When they get stuck sometimes all they need is just the question to be reworded. Many times after reading the question out loud I say, "so basically what the questions is asking is....." and that is normally good enough to get them to finish the question.

Chapter 3 
In Mrs. Nickell's class, there is a round wagon design. She has here students at tables of four and the tables kind of like the picture to the right. The main obstacles that are in that design is when the students sit and they have their chairs all the way pushed out. Other than that, her room has a nice flow that isn't hard to move around.

Chapter 4
In the back of the classroom so that the students can be closer to the board. The teacher really should rarely be sitting down, she should be up and roaming the classroom so that the students don't get distracted.

Post Field Trip Post

This past Thursday my class and I took a trip down to Southern Methodist University and the George Bush Library. Pictured to the left is a picture on the steps of SMU's education building. We got to go in and tour the education facility. I was really cool and they had new state of the art technology. One of my favorite things that we got to do at SMU was their Virtual Reality Classroom Stimulator. They had a classroom of five virtual students, each with different personalities for aspiring teacher to practice teaching. The students were controlled by the people upstairs and could talk back and move. I like it because it gave a feel of a real classroom without even being in a real classroom. 

At the George Bush library we got to see his famous education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act. He believes that every child can read and write and it forces teachers to teach every single student how to do those basic things. 

In the library, we also got to see a replica of his Oval Office. Pictured is a picture of me in his chair sitting behind his desk. It was pretty cool to see what the Presidential Office looks like. There wasn't much personal stuff inside of the office except for the table behind us, that table has pictures of his family. Other than that is was mainly white couches and books.