Educational Words of Wisdom from a Kindergarten Teacher and Instructional Coach

  Incorporating Technology to Support a Small Group of Students             “Today’s students live in an information age and increasingly connect and interact with diverse cultures and traditions around the world” (Dwyer, 2016). Technology can greatly help students when connecting across cultures and can help widen their global view. The three day lesson plan I created had some technology incorporated but it was missing a way to promote global awareness. I went back through my lessons and realized that I have two students in my class who have mastered the science standards K.LS1.From molecules to organisms; Structures and Processes. This presented a perfect opportunity to incorporate an awesome website that could help them gain global awareness about China while working on the lessons math standard K.MD.A- directly compare two objects with a measurable attribute in common to see which object has more/less of the attribute ...

  Lesson Creation Reflection             Recently I created a detailed lesson for my students, really focusing on how varied my students are and different ways I could support them as individual learners. When educators are creating lessons for their students there is so much to consider: student’s readiness; their cultural identities and schema; technology that can support; ELL, special needs, and gifted students; assessment strategies; and many, many more. The following will describe some of the instructional strategies used, assessments, technology used and ways that the lesson was differentiated to meet the needs of a diverse classroom. This lesson focuses on my state standard of asking and answering questions about unknown words in a text. Some instructional strategies I use throughout are as follows: name sticks; turn and talk; partner work; photo cards and drawn images; repeated phrases; hand motions; writing / drawi...