Classroom VS Gym

Classroom Observation
Kindergarten
12/2/11

1. The classroom is decorated with very bright and stimulating colors. All the posters and anything hanging on the wall are placed lower on the wall so it is close to the kindergartner’s level. The room was broken up into different sections for different activities. There was a reading corner, a corner for building with logos and black, and another section for cooking and one more section for arts and crafts.

2. The classroom is different from the gymnasium in an educational setting because the classroom is set up for more cognitive learning and the gym is set up more geared towards psychomotor learning in my opining. Classroom teachers great there lessons towards cognitive learning, where as physical education teacher focus more on psychomotor learning, not that we do not teach the other two domains as well, but your learning environment is focused more on psychomotor learning and development.

3. The classroom atmosphere that I experienced today was what I would call bubbly, friendly, inviting, positive and happy. I feel that the atmosphere is the class was like this because the children are between four and five years old. I think that that plays a huge role in developing their learning environment. Children that young need a positive friendly environment to be successful.

4. We had the opportunity to see a class discussion on cooking. The teacher played a game with the students where she read off the ingredients in a recipe and the students had to guess what it was being made from hearing what goes into the food. The students loved this. Also the second half of the class was free choice so we had the chance to float around and interact with the students at all different stations from arts and crafts, reading, building with legos, and building with large wooden blocks.

5. The language and literacy levels of the kindergarten students were at the beginning stages of development. I experienced this first hand when one of the students at the reading station read a book about dogs to me by just looking at the pictures alone, because he could not read yet.

6. The teacher got the students engaged in the lesson by being very enthusiastic. The more excited she got about reading the ingredients to the students the more excited they were to guess what was being made. She also got down to the students level which in my opinion plays a huge role with keeping younger child engaged. It shows them that you are friendly, it is inviting and it is a non intimidating way to present yourself to a child.

7. The social behaviors that I witnessed form the kindergardners were that they do not really interact with each other. They all seem to still be at the stage where they play by themselves. Not many of these children understood the concept of sharing, and would get angry when another child tried to use whatever it was that they were using.

8. What I learned from my classroom visit that will help me better understand and teach kindergarten aged students is to avoid partner play, and games where they have to work together in a group. I think those types of games would be more appropriate for students a little bit older and more mature then kindergarteners.

9. One more insight that I gained from this observation is that if being a physical education teacher do not work out for me then I would love to go back to school to be a kindergarten teacher!