Week 2 Reflection

After having a three-day week to start, this week was the first full five-day week at my PDS school. We started on Monday and Tuesday with kindergarten home visits, had one final day on Wednesday to make any final preparations, and then the students had their first two days of school on Thursday and Friday.

Being able to go on the home visits to meet both parents and students was a very interesting experience. From a generic standpoint, I experienced about what I expected to see – a broad range of living conditions and parent involvement. I saw some things I was quite happy about, and other things that I was disappointed with.

But all in all, being able to go into the homes of these children and see first hand what their home life is like does give me additional insight as to what could be going on around them on a regular basis. I was able to see what kind of resources each of the children had and what kind of instructional support they’d receive at home. I was pleased by the number of parents who had sent a kindergartener through West Milford before and thus knew the routine.

The first day of school was a challenge, but one that was alleviated in some manner by most of the students attending open house earlier in the week. Because of that, the room was not completely foreign to them. But we still had to walk each of them individually through the classroom procedures for when they arrived in the morning, and the rest of the day was spent familiarizing them with the general calendar. It was encouraging to see how many of them already knew things such as days of the week, months, money and coinage, and colors.

Day Two seemed to be a bit more demanding, at least from my perspective. The students were slowly getting used to the school and the classroom, which meant not only were they more comfortable in opening up to us as teachers but they also wanted to test their limits and see exactly what they could get away with. In an effort to perfect a new school-wide positive approach to discipline, my host teacher would award a clip (which counts for five minutes of recess/free time) to an individual student any time she witnessed an exceptionally good behavior (as opposed to the first day’s strategy of awarding them to the entire class for group good behavior).

This individual strategy proved difficult, as some kids who were not behaving badly did not earn many clips simply because they were not the first to be noticed. It seemed by the end of the day, my host teacher, her aide, and I had determined that some kind of middle ground needed to be reached, and we will likely spend the next week or so continuing to test strategies until we find an effective one.