Day 2 at Cincinnatus

One my second day of field experience at Cincinnatus Elementary School I had the chance to see a kindergarten class. I had never seen a kindergarten class previously to this day so I was looking forward to observing and working with the kindergarten students. I immediately noticed that the students had a high amount of energy and were going to be very active throughout the class. The first activity was a warm up tag game. Six students were given a koosh balls and those students would be the taggers and everyone else would try not to get tagged. In order to get the kids to sit quietly and listen to the instructions the teacher had all of the students sit down and look at him to ensure everyone's attention. The teacher only handed one of the koosh balls to students that were sitting down and were very quiet. If a student was moving around and talking to another student they would not be able to get the koosh ball and be a tagger. I believe this technique for choosing who would be a tagger was extremely effective. Almost all of the students were trying to sit as quietly and as still as possible so that they would chosen to be a tagger. The next activity was kidnastics stations. At each station the students had to practice a different skill such as an airplane scale or an egg rocker. The teacher demonstrated each of the skills first before splitting up the students to move to each station. For management at each of the stations there was a teacher or teachers aid. There were two or three aids in this class. Tom and I were at two of the stations helping the students with the skills at that particular station. Having one teacher at each station made it easy to use proximity as a behavior management technique. Another thing that the teachers did to manage behavior was playing music while the students were doing their kidnastics skills. When the music stopped playing the students knew that was their cue to move onto the next station. The use of music was very effective in keeping the kids interested as well as listening for when the song was over so they could move onto the next station. Overall, the teachers handled the behavior of these students very well and there were no problems at any point during the class.