Chapter 7 (post 6)

Chapter 7

Make a list of the sequence of skills necessary for ultimate mastery of the content of your lesson through a constructivist approach. 

Which of these learning activities/skills lend themselves to student’s individual or group construction?  How might you structure learning activities that lead students to discover these skills/these principles?

The lesson that my group chose to focus on in class was teaching time to a group of first graders. They will learn how to tell time on a digital and analog clock to the hour and half hour. 

•        The first activity we would do is create their own clocks using small paper plates and writing the numbers so the children have a better grasp of the location and the rotation of the numbers on the clock. 
•        We would then talk about the mind hand and the hour hand that are on a clock and discuss how time is read by using the term “o’clock” when referring to the hour.
•        After practicing telling time on small manipulative clocks and their hand made clock, we would practice making the time with our bodies. This would be done in groups with one person being the hour hand and another being the minute hand.
•      Children can practice telling time with a more skilled peer and then make a bridge when they believe they have shown the correct answer on their clock.
•        The final step would be to assess the children’s knowledge by doing a worksheet and the teacher walking around the classroom assessing the children’s understanding.
•        A final culminating activity would be to have the children document and create a daily schedule by drawing the time on an analog clock and representing it digitally and displaying it in the room. When transitions and activities occur children will take note and create the schedule.

When creating their own clock that will be an individual project that the children can take ownership in and will keep at their desk to refer to when they need it. A group/partner activity is creating the times with their bodies and working together to demonstrate the correct time in groups of three-four children. The children will also work together to create the daily schedule and apply the skills that they have learned over the week.

PLE 5: Memory Process

How might your knowledge of the memory processes guide your instructional decisions?

          Having the knowledge of how our brain retrieves memories and information is important for a teacher as we often call on our students and demand answers out of them. But a knowledgeable teacher will realize that they need to give a wait time of approximately three seconds before calling on someone to answer so that students have enough time to process the information and hen draw upon their own information.

            I think it is also important to teach about how to remember something just like it is important to reach study skills. I would do this in my classroom through modeling. It is difficult for an adult to remember some of the things that we require of children so routinely showing the children and practicing memory games and techniques. I think this can start as early as having to learn a nursery rhyme my memory in kindergarten or first grade.

This article shows how students who have teachers that demonstrate and encourage the practice of memory techniques preformed better than students whose teachers did not emphasize memory as strongly. 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1992.tb01653.x/abstract

PLE #4

What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and be able to do that relate to cognitive learning? 

One thing that is important for students to realize is that they are often in control of their own learning. This can be done my actively listening or taking notes in older grades and even doing activities such as writing down a fact you learned while a story is being read aloud in younger grades.  Students also can make connections to their prior knowledge or make sense of a difficult concept my creating their own way of thinking about it.

Although metacognition seems like a very abstract task if used correctly you can begin to make young children aware of their thought process.  It can be described through concrete examples and then as the student’s abilities grow they will not have to be as aware of their metacognition  I think the earlier that this is brought up to children the easier it will be for them to master and make sense of more difficult concepts in the future.

This is a link to an article I found particularly interesting. Many schools are now serving breakfast for their students when they arrive and I frequently see students eating on their favorite Coco puff cereal. This article makes the argument for breakfast foods that have higher protein and other sources of energy and how it can help increase their cognitive abilities during the school day.

http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/spacelab/pubs/MahoneyEtAl.pdf

Assessment Strategies

Think of a lesson plan from your licensure area.  Knowing that assessment is an integral part of teaching, explain at least four informal and formal assessments that you will use in your lesson plan to provide you with feedback and involve the students in assessing their own learning.

The lesson that I  based the assessment on was a math lesson on using non standard forms of measurement to measure different items and the concept of estimating. This lesson was designed for the first grade.  


Informal check ins are unplanned check ins that can be easily done to give the teacher a basic idea of where the class is in understanding a given topic. It is a quick way that lets her know if I needs to explain the lesson again or if I can move on because everyone has a grasp of the concept. One way I would test informally is getting a gauge of what knowledge the children have before the lesson by having them give me a thumbs up if they have heard of it and know something about it, a sideways thumb if they have heard of it before and then a thumbs down if they have know idea what I am talking about. I would use this again during the lesson to see if by the end of the lesson they have a grasp of it. 

Another form of informal assessment that I would use would be to have a homework assignment or a in class worksheet that they would work on individually for completion. This would be 'graded' but points would not be counted off for the wrong answer it would just give me a better understanding of who has it and who needs some more work. 

When I felt that everyone had a good grasp of the information I would then give them a 'quiz' of just a couple problems for them to work out and be graded if they were correct or incorrect. This would be used as a formal assessment at the end of the math unit on measuring with nonstandard forms.