LUKE-ELIZABETH GARTLEY
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Elementary Practicum: Fletcher-Maynard Academy

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.
Picture
First grade students brainstormed different ways to say "fiction" and "nonfiction" and placed fiction and nonfiction image cards in the appropriate column.
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A fifth frade student rearranges events on an historical timeline.
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