Field Blog Post 4

I thoroughly enjoyed my first day observing at Gesu School. I spent a few hours Wednesday morning observing Mrs. Parisi and Mrs. Schueler’s kindergarten class. The time spent in their classroom offered me a glimpse of what it is like to work with young children. The students began the day by completing bell work, which were timetables that they had to fill in and color. After that, they read a note that Mrs. Parasi wrote to them explaining what activities they would be doing that day at school. I noticed that Mrs. Parisi has the students cite words, punctuation marks, and overall sentence structures of the note as a form of review and practice. That particular day, the students were going to three specials: library, gym, and Spanish, which meant that they were going to have a super busy day. When Mrs. Parisi finished this activity it was time for the students to go to visit the library. During the kindergarteners library visit the librarian read them two stories that related to snow and winter weather because that was what the weather was like on that day. I was amazed by how engaged and quiet the students were during story time. After their story time ended the students were allowed to check out 1 book to take home for the week and read. I couldn’t believe how excited they all were to take out books from the library! Next, the kindergarteners were off to physical education where they were able to release some pent up energy by running around the gym. Most of the activities were fun and easy for the students to understand which I found to be a good way to introduce sportsmanship and teamwork. After spending only a few hours in Mrs. Parasi’s classroom I could see that she was a great teacher who was a big advocate for teaching her students about responsibility, self-control, and ownership of actions and behavior.