The Beginning of a New Start!

Sept. 19, 2013

Have you ever encountered a situation with one or more children that have ADHD? Well, walking into the classroom 133 at Madison Middle School was like walking into a room full of ADHD kids.  In reality, I walked into a room with 15 normal Middle School kids. Middle School kids have quite a bit of energy! There were seven girls and nine boys that gathered in this room to be educated on Language Arts for 90 minutes. As you can imagine keeping Middle School kids entertained and focused for 90 minutes on a subject, most of them do not want to do, can be quite challenging. Madison Middle School hired quite a talented teacher to teach Language Arts to all these students! As a observing student teacher, I learned one of the biggest challenges in the classroom is to "control" the environment; therefore, I am quite pleased I get to observe this talented teacher on how to control a classroom!

The kids were put into groups of two and had to make a poster on either a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, pronoun, and conjunction; the kids had to give a two minute presentation on defining what their subject does for a sentence and give an example. I went around to each group to see how it was going and if they new how they were going to present their presentation. I have to admit, I have never been in the presence of such a creative group of children! The kids found ways to involve their audience into their presentations such as finding objects, doing actions, or asking the audience questions.

This amazing teacher has set up her classroom to be more "entertaining" then "parallel straight." She has medium long plastic tables that look wooden. The tables were set up in an "S" shape form in the room. I felt the setting of the tables give the kids more of a "free expression" setting then a "strict, primp, and proper" setting. At that young age, it is important to get the kids involved and comfortable; instead of having a setting such as a college classroom--sitting, staring, and lecturing.

As for the teaching techniques I saw, they were quite understandable. This marvelous teacher focuses on "peer help" to learn and educate. She let the kids interact and help each other along with her teaching/lecturing the children herself. Her purpose for the poster presentations was to have the kids educate and learn from each other. To keep up with the kids "ants in their pants" behavior she gave a leeway of allowing the kids to stand up by their chair while listening to her lecture. Also, she brighten the kids day by informing them that her goal this year was not to focus on lectures and worksheets, but by physically practicing and group projects to educate the kids on grammar!