Educational Words of Wisdom from a Kindergarten Teacher and Instructional Coach

  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...

  Everyone has a learning style that best suits them, adult learners to elementary students. According to a study published by the Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, “determining the learning features that students have, and studying with appropriate strategies after this determination process, will affect the process of learning in a positive way” (Guven & Ozbek 2007) . Educators can increase student success in their classroom when they take into account the various learning styles of their students and plan accordingly. This post will discuss why taking into account students’ learning styles is necessary work for educators to do as well as how the data is useful when it comes to planning and instruction. Student learning Styles Sample Group- Kindergarten The graph ‘Student Learning Styles’ is comprised of 5 students from a kindergarten classroom in 2024. They completed (with help) a learning style inventory to determine if they were more of a kinesthetic, a...

       Learning environments need to be built with a foundation of safety and community. Students need to feel that they are valued and that it is a safe space to try new things, to succeed and fail. According to Katie Topple’s article, cultural diversity in curriculum is focused on empowering students through connection, however, teachers may not have the ability to change the content but how they instruct their students. She goes on to state that her focus is more on “…lesson delivery to elicit better engagement from culturally and linguistically diverse sudents” (2015). I think it is important to understand that the curriculum itself might not best suit your diverse student population so it is up to educators to be mindful of their class population and chose instructional aids that will help all students make connections with the content that are relevant to their individual differences. With that in mind it is important for teachers to get to know their student...