Math Class Observation

Introduction: During my time at James A. Whitaker Elementary School in Buena Park Unified School District, I was able to observe Mrs. Solomon’s fourth grade class. Mrs. Solomon makes sure that her class is a very welcoming place. She does so by standing at the door in the morning and personally greeting each and every one of her students. Once each of the students have entered the class, Mrs. Solomon opens the class session by enthusiastically saying, “Welcome back!” and the students respond, “Glad to be back!” This ensures that each class begins on a positive, thankful, and welcoming note. During class, Mrs. Solomon does her best to maintain a fun and sometimes silly learning environment. While observing in her class, there were multiple …show more content…
This lesson was a continuation of a lesson that Mrs. Solomon had begun the day before. To open the lesson, Mrs. Solomon talked about the different types of metric measurements and gave examples of their lengths and sizes. Some of these examples Mrs. Solomon simply talked about and others she actually brought in something to represent the size, length, or amount of the measurement. She then asked her students questions about which measurements would be more effective for use in certain situations. Throughout the opening, I noticed that both Andy and Alicia stayed pretty quiet, but as the lesson went on, both students raised their hands along with their classmates and answered the questions correctly. After this exercise, Mrs. Solomon moved on to working some measurement problems on the overhead projector. She did a number of problems and then did what she called a “temperature check” with her students to see where her students were at in their understanding. In the temperature check, Andy signaled with the lowest understanding symbol and Alicia said signaled with the middle level symbol. The rest of the class either signaled at the middle or highest levels of understanding. At this time, Mrs. Solomon assigned a few individual practice problems and encouraged the students who understood to help their neighbors if they needed aid. During this time …show more content…
To start off this lesson, Mrs. Solomon discussed the definition of a proper noun and then gave examples of different types of proper nouns. To check for understanding, she asked the class to give her their own examples of proper nouns. Toward the end of this time, both Andy and Alicia gave a number of correct examples. Next, Mrs. Solomon assigned a group activity/competition. For this activity, the class was divided up into table groups and one scribe was chosen per group. The rest of the group was supposed to look through the books that were in their desks to find proper nouns and write them down. The team with the most correct proper nouns, received pencils. During the group work, both Andy and Alicia were very animated and made a number of contributions to their respective team’s lists. During this group work, Mrs. Solomon walked around the classroom and checked the teams’ answers and offered advice. At the end of the exercise, neither Andy nor Alicia’s team won, but Mrs. Solomon said that all of the lists were similar in their number of proper