Learning Behaviors

In attending to my service learning hours, I have been going into more than one class per week.  The third grade teacher that I am learning from has a unique way of teaching.  Her strengths are in Cognitivism as she is very organized in the things she teaches.  She presents her subject and helps the students with sensory and material.  For example, while I was in there she brought two pans of brownies for her math lesson.  She wrote on the board two fractions asking the students to write on their white boards which fraction was the largest.  The fractions were 1/2 and 1/24.  There were approximately five students who wrote 1/24 on their board and the rest wrote 1/2.  Those that wrote 1/2 understood the fraction question asked.  She then took the two pans of brownies and showed them what 1/2 of the pan looked like, and what 1/24 of the pan looked like.  There were 23 students in class and she asked me to help cut up the brownies equally into portions for the class.  I then offered an idea to divide the pans into 24 pieces, but one pan we would have 4 rows and 6 columns and the other pan would have 2 rows and 12 columns.  The pan with two rows showed the students what 1/2 looked like compared to the pan that was divided in 24.  We then served the brownies, each student received two brownies one long shaped brownie and one smaller rectangle.

In the sixth grade class that I helped in, the teacher uses Constructivism in her class.  She often has the students move around during the math lesson when she teaches as she is also teaching fractions, but they are multiplying and dividing them.  She has them work in groups and I get to work with a group of children who might be struggling with a math concept.  She gives them a 2 problem math assessment before I come in so that she knows who is struggling and then she assigns the students to specific groups to reiterate those concepts.