I did not post this until today, the 10th due to the fact that I met with our teacher again today. This Monday I was finally able to meet with our teacher, Mr. Steffens, and have a brief discussion with him regarding our groups work in his class. This is an "exerpt" from the update which I posted on a google doc to update my group members of the progress which was made at Monday's meeting.
. . . . . Brittny sent out in the email from him last week, he wants us to do a sort of collaboration within the unit that the 4th and 5th graders are studying right now.
This is the information from the e-mail he sent us; he mentioned something about a narrative journal writing project based on some aspect of Westward Expansion. However with our late starting and such we decided it would best for us to try and integrate our project into the time they will spend learning about the Constitution. He said that Ms. Geiger already talked with the other 4th grade team and they are going to work on making it “less dry.” So once I started talking with him I expressed my main concern being that we had to relate this project in some way to social media and social change, and he said that we could most likely come up with something to do locally. I expressed to him the importance we expressed in terms of really having the students come up with the idea rather than us handing one to them and he came up with a good idea of within the next few weeks us creating a survey online or a blog of some sort for the students to take allowing us to know their interests and such so if we could start doing that (Katie :) ) that would be a good starting point for sure. He did say that they would not be done learning the content until February 22nd which we can work with as long as we try to get lots done during this somewhat down time we have so that once we get in the classroom we are ready for “anything.”
He expressed the importance of communication via e-mail as often as possible rather than face to face meetings as we had a brief one of today, which makes me feel better but he did stress the fact that we need to keep in contact with him almost on a daily basis as well so that we are all on the same page. So I guess that we need to decide if Brittny wants to remain the student contact as we had originally proposed or if you would like to be the teacher contact. It is up to you we just need to decide.
Brittny and I met with him this morning, February 10th; during the students reading block from 1145 to 115 and it was quite different than I have ever experienced in a classroom. First of all I'm not used to working with older students, so it was unique to be in this fourth grade classroom where students were all working so independently. We were able to observe the class working on their journals regarding either a journey on the Oregon trail or the Trail of Tears. All of the students were working but they were all doing different things simultaneously which was really neat to me how the students knew what they were supposed to be doing and got right to work (with the exception of a few stragglers). After talking with Mr. Steffens we learned that each class both fourth and fifth had a different subject which they were working on. His class is working on the idea of Westward Expansion, while the other fourth grade class is working on the Gold Rush. All the fourth and fifth grade students were given the choice of what topic they studied and then they go to the corresponding teacher for 6-8 weeks, depending on how long it takes for them to learn that particular content and complete the assigned tasks. We learned that Mr. Steffens has about 9 5th graders in his class, out of the 16 or so total students. After observing the students working I realized that even though there is a mixture of 4th and 5th graders, regardless of that fact the varying levels of writing ability within that group is so diverse. One student was completely done with her assignment, one student was putting finishing touches on his final draft, one student was completing his rough draft and some students were only halfway through the preliminary drafts of their paper. I learned that differentiation will be key in keeping the attention of all the students and making sure that there are varying levels of activities which are applicable to all the students.
We discussed the future, specifically next week and decided that at least two of our group members will be going back to observe the students again, I'm hoping that it will be either myself and Brittny and the other member of our group who hasn't been to the classroom to see the kids yet. It will be our job to come up with a more refined idea of what we want the kids to do (as best as we can) this week so that we can talk to him about it next week. Next Friday the fourth and fifth grade teachers will be meeting to plan for the next chapters which is where we will come into play. The fourth grade teams will be working on the Constitution; after talking to Mr. Steffens we want to try and do a website or blog of some sort in which the students work to try and find a way to make the content relevant so that the Consitution takes importance in their lives. Most people seem to just "brush it off" as though it doesn't see applicable to them however we are going to work on changing that.
For now this is all that we have but we will keep in close contact with our teacher via e-mail so hopefully we will have lots of updates for next weeks situation reports. It will be our job of working on a survey this week to provide the students with so that we can find out their interests and what level they are at technologically so that we know where a good starting place will be after they learn the content.
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