Mid-semester+Letter

Dear Mrs. Larsen I would like to thank you for allowing me into your classroom to teach and observe and learn. I am very much enjoying my time with you and your students and I feel like I have learned more from the time I spend in your classroom then in any class I have taken thus far. This experience I am gaining is going to be an excellent foundation for the rest of my educational experiences and I could not imagine being placed in any other classroom. From you have I learned many things such as how to instruct and manage guided reading, the importance of allowing all children to take risks, the use of positive reinforcement, and how to use small group work to fit maximum instruction into minimum time. Coming into my observation of guided reading I had read about it in a few of my text books but the way they described it I could not imagine how it would work in my head. After having seen you actually interact with a guided reading group and having led one myself I feel like all the vague descriptions I read now have a concrete basis. The way you interact with the students during this time is so interesting and I hope to one day be able to be as “with it” as you are. Noticing all of the different strategies students are using and making sure they are aware they are doing to me seems like a feat because I am just trying to make sure everyone is on the same page. I hope that someday I will be as comfortable and as able to interact with the students they way that you do. In your classroom all of your students are will to and able to take risks, they are never scared to be wrong, they just try. I believe that making students feel comfortable enough to do this is a skill not enough teachers’ posses. I can remember being in elementary school and being afraid to raise my hand if I was not sure I knew the answer. One example I saw of this was when the children were trying to figure out the pattern for the month of March and so many students came to the front of the room and tried and were wrong. When going back to the rug the students did not seem discouraged that they were wrong, but proud that they had taken a chance. Dr. McKool has said many times that “students need to be able to feel comfortable to take risks in your classroom.” I feel that you have created the perfect environment for this by never criticizing a student for being wrong and encouraging students for their attempts. One of my biggest weaknesses in my own opinion is classroom management and being in your classroom I am learning so much about how to actually manage a classroom. Your classroom is always under control and in order and the students know exactly what you expect from them at all times. Your use of positive reinforcing will hopefully influence my own management in some way. Also in my classroom management class we learned about the importance of rules and routines and clear direction giving. I see all of these clearly in you classroom. Your students always know what’s next and what they are supposed to be doing and you always give them clear directions before everything they do. I admire your classroom management and I hope that I will be able to adapt some of your management techniques for use in my own classroom. One final thing that comes to mind is your ability to fit so much instruction into such a short amount of time. In the book I am reading for my professional development group the author talks about how well managed centers or groups can save the teacher a lot of time because it allows for a few things to be going on at once. It also allows for the teacher to be able to meet in a small group with each student each day. Your classroom is a perfect example of this. They way you organize the group work is highly effective and it allows for many different possibilities as far as activities and groupings. So many things get done in such a short period of time and you are able to interact with all the students closely every day. This grouping is something I think about all the time when I am thinking about planning my classroom and it is very exciting to see it work so well. Having seen it in your classroom I now believe it is possible to accomplish with the right management of the classroom and training of the students. This semester, being in your classroom I feel like I have learned so much about teaching that I could never learn from sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. It is so great to be able to read about something in my text book or talk about something in class an then to be able to have something concrete to be able to connect it to. I am so grateful for all of the feedback you have given me throughout the semester and I hope that you will continue to do so because I would like to get as much out of this experience as I possibly can. Thank you so much again for allowing me into your classroom and am looking forward to the next 5 weeks in your classroom. Thank you again Kelly Nolan