My Fisrt Day of Elementary School... in 7 Years

I was able to volunteer in my dear cousin Kristen Barnum's 5th grade class at an elementary school in Provo. It was refreshing to be back in that atmosphere, where the students aren't so concerned about getting ready for college or starting a career.

 

This class had about 30ish students, and I know that the way they learn is different from each. So as Mrs. Barnum was teaching her social studies rotations, she used some of each learning modality to inform the children about early European explorers, and to, hopefully, help it stick.

 

For the lesson, she had a power point with pictures and words printed on the screen for visual learners, she had them take notes for the kinesthetic learners, and talked through the slides for those who are auditory learners. She also is going to have them each do a poster on one of the explorers that they talked about, like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Amerigo Vespucci, so they can further understand them.

When they had extra time, to get all of the jitters out of them, Kristen had the students play four corners, although instead of numbering the corners, she gave each of them a direction: northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest, so they could learn the directions. I think this helped each of the students, regardless of learning style preferences, because they were all involved in this activity and all seemed to enjoy it. They probably didn't think they were learning anything from this activity, but they had to think about each of the corners and what corner they were in, and I believed that they did remember the directions by the end of the game.   

Kristen did a good job of keep the attentions of each of the kids, and catering to their needs in the ways that they learned. For recess, if they hadn't had their parents sign their planner saying that they checked their homework, they had to stay in for recess. If they had missing homework assignments, they had to stay in for 10 minutes to work on their assignment. This is a great incentive for each child to get their homework done on time, since they want their recess time, and so they can show their parents what they are learning in school.

This was a really fun first experience. The first thing that I did was to grade spelling tests. They had a bonus spelling word: patriot. A lot of them were able to spell it, but not all. Some of the ways that they misspelled it were very simple, common mistakes, but some were very entertaining. Some of them go as follows:

• patret
• patrot
• paitreate
• paytreit
• patreiete

I remember how I could never get the bonus words on my spelling tests, so I know how this goes, sounding out the words, thinking what vowels could make the sound in what word.

I am excited to go back and help even more! I hope that I can watch the students progress as they gain this education.