Mrs. Hengesbach's Class Report

Next, I was at the first-grade door waiting for Mrs. Hengesbach's class to return from specials. When they arrived, I received a wonderful warm welcome for the whole class who was expecting my arrival. I took a seat in the back of the classroom and the students gathered on a carpet in the front of the room. Mrs. Hengesbach read and sang a story, the topic became clear soon, they were studying poetry. The students were told to go back to their seats to write whether the book was poetry like the day before, or it was not and explain why. The whole class enjoyed the story and they were excited to talk about what they thought. I had a few students ask me how to spell some words and some that wanted to tell me their opinion. In this class, like the kindergarten class, the classroom was set-up with long tables and supplies was on top. The students had journals to write their answers in and I was surprised they were expected to write actual full sentences. It turns out the students are required to write and are told how to write proper sentences, but they are asked what they wrote it is not expected to be legible. Once the students were done, with writing and explaining they all sat down and discussed parts of speech. The students were …show more content…
The room had 5 different centers: one was to Mrs. Hengesbach's desk, one was the computer station, one was with iPads, one was independent reading, and one center was read-along books and players. I strolled around and observed the students for a little bit, then I went to Mrs. Hengsbach's desk to watch and work with her group. Each center lasted for 10-minutes, then they rotated to the next center. I really enjoyed having the students read to me and helping them sound out words from time to time. Mrs. Hengesbach was able to observe the students and adjust to their abilities. She also made notes to herself about students' progress and items to work on. Soon it was time to prepare for