What strategies does the teacher use to actively engage the students? How effective are these?
I was supposed to be in Ms. Hutchinson's class today, but she took her class on a fieldtrip during the two hours I normally volunteer in, so I was with a different fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Crane. When I arrived to her classroom, they just returned from the library where they set up their displays of their county projects (the students floats were very creative...a little TOO creative...it makes me wonder how much help they had from their parents...). The class discussed what they liked about each other's floats and what they learned from researching their assigned counties. After that discussion, they went onto their language arts lesson. Today's lesson was on the words "obstacle" and "bravery". They had to guess what they thought the word means and share examples of what the word describes.
I liked the way Mrs. Crane set up her classroom - the desks were lined in an open square with two rows that stretched across the middle. I think this desk formation makes each lecture more of a discussion. The kids feel like they're not only talking to the teacher, but to the rest of their classmates as well. Almost all of the students would listen to whoever was speaking and respond by raising their hands to share stories or examples that went along with the lesson or story the last child spoke about.
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