Elementary Practicum: Fletcher-Maynard Academy
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I completed my elementary practicum experience at Fletcher-Maynard Academy, a small public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had a wonderful time at the Fletch-Maynard, working with my amazing supervising practitioner, Ms. Aishah. I undertook a variety of projects and lesson units during the semester. One of my first projects was a fifth grade unit on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, which I adapted from iCivics.org.
One of my favorite lesson units was a first grade fiction/nonfiction unit during November, Native American Heritage Month. Each week during the month, we would read a fiction and nonfiction selection about a particular Native American tribe, beginning with the Wampanoag of Massachusetts. I wanted to particularly focus on Native Americans as a still-living culture. I used excerpts from Children of Native America Today by Yvonne Wakim Dennis and Arlene Hirschfelder; we also compared traditional Plains Indians paintings and ledger drawings with S. D. Nelson's contemporary picture book illustrations. I really enjoyed planning and teaching the lessons, and the students were wonderful and engaged throughout the unit. One of my other favorite lessons was a collaborative lesson with the music teacher. Early into my practicum, she asked that I develop a lesson to introduce fourth and fifth grade students to a selection of music pieces from history in anticipation of a performance called "Voices of History." Later in the school year, students would be attending the Voices of History performance, a program from the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston. The five musical selections represented a great range of history, from a 1066 Gregorian chant up to the late 1800s. Using a laptop and projector, I had students listen to the vocal performances on YouTube, and as a class and in small groups, we arranged a historical timeline of the years represented by the musical pieces. Each year had four cards (see image below): estimated world population, historical era, and two major world events. I was really impressed with how engaged the students were; they were interested in the music and able to make very specific observations about the changes in musical style over the course of time. They also did a wonderful job reasoning out the timeline. In both the music/history timeline lesson and the Native American Heritage Month/fiction vs. nonfiction lessons, I referred to my assessment activities as "games" to students. I had first graders brainstorm different ways to say fiction or nonfiction, and in another lesson they placed "fiction" or "nonfiction" image cards onto a T-chart (see below). Referring to these simple assessment activities as "games" worked especially well with first graders. I called my timeline activity with fourth and fifth graders a game too, and although they were a bit more suspicious, they still enjoyed the activity. |
First grade students brainstormed different ways to say
"fiction" and "nonfiction" and placed fiction and nonfiction image cards in the appropriate column.
A fifth frade student rearranges events on an historical timeline.
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