Lesson+Planning+Tecniques+of+Cooperating+Teacher

Jennifer Thompson September 26, 2011 Classroom Management I am currently in a Kindergarten placement, and I have observed and learned about how my cooperating teacher goes about her lesson planning each week. Before the beginning of the school year, the kindergarten teachers met as a department to map out how they wanted to set up their year. This process included accounting for holidays, and breaks throughout the school year. They assigned a generalized topic that the entire kindergarten level would be working on for each week. The topics they focus on tend to have to do with the big book that they read as a class each week.  The classes are categorized by ability, so each teacher plans their lessons according to what level their class is able to realistically do. My class does shared reading at the carpet together, while two other classes have been able to being guided reading with the teaching forming reading groups and working with them in their groups. Because of these gaps in achievement level, my teacher must make her lesson plans to fit shared reading, and will cross over into guided reading once the students are ready. My teacher’s lesson plans are made onto pre-printed lesson plan guides that contain topics and subjects. She fills in the activities and books that she will be doing for the following week, typically on a Thursday so that she will not have to spend much time finishing up after school ends on a Friday afternoon. The main planning that my teacher does is to come up with new workstation ideas each week. The students rotate in groups to new workstations each day, and the teacher has them prepared the week in advance so that they are able to see them displayed on the board whenever needed the next week. The workstations consist of various language arts topics in order to aid their reading and writing ability they are focusing so strongly on. My teacher’s planning period is when she tries to get most of the lesson planning completed, because it is the time that the student’s are in their second specialty classes, so the kindergarten teachers meet up in one of their classrooms and discuss and trade ideas for workstations for the following week. Due to standard procedures that do not require planning, such as writing in their handwriting folders for the first 20 minutes, calendar time for the next 20 minutes, a gap that requires plans for shared reading, then specialty classes that take up an hour and a half combined, and lunch time and recess totaling around 45 to 50 minutes, classroom instruction to plan for is extremely limited. I was informed that the majority of planning is taken from specific writing and math instruction books that plot day by day how to introduce and teach the material. From there, the teacher puts her on twist to how she presents the information. Having books handy that lay out how the teaching can be is useful for when the teacher is absent, and a substitute has to take over, because it allows them to pick up right where they left off. In my teacher’s lesson plans, she has built in time for concentration of social studies lessons, which usually involves reading a book over a topic with the class and having class discussions, because in kindergarten managing identity and connections from the student to the community is a large social studies topic. From what I’ve been able to see, the lesson planning portion is very simplified and broad, and the harder part is fitting in to the next day the lesson that was supposed to be taught. What I’ve witnessed my teacher do on grandparent’s day when more than half of the class was checked out, she combined the topic from the previous day to the following day so that the entire class wouldn’t fall behind.