Ms. Brown's Class February 15th

Today when I walked into Ms. Brown's class, she said that I would be helping by taking over her class while she did reading assessments with individual students. So after she picked the students back up from lunch and explained the instructions for their language arts learning time, she let them know to direct all questions to me so she could do the assessments.
One way Ms. Brown's class is diverse is that she has learners of different ability levels. While I was in charge, I noticed that every student needed attention in one way or another. The students who were quicker to finish their tasks for the day often got distracted or started acting out when they were done because they were bored and so they needed me to help redirect them to a different choice or activity so they weren't disturbing the other learners. Some of the other students who were slower to finish sometimes needed me to sit next to them while they sounded words out or if they got stuck and weren't able to understand the instructions. I noticed that a lot of them didn't actually need help with the words (Even though they thought they did) but that they just focused a little bit better and felt a little more confident when I was there with them. There was also a little bit of "when the cat's away, the mice will play" attitude and so lots of the students struggled with staying on task and focusing on their work and there were a couple times when Ms. Brown felt she needed to step back in and remind them to be quiet.
While the kids were at recess, I talked a little bit with Ms. Brown about it because it was so chaotic at times. She's been teaching for nearly 30 years now and she said the trend the past little while has been for the curriculum to be very aggressive even starting in kindergarten. Since the curriculum in kindergarten is more aggressive, the students lose out on the ability to play and socialize like they were once able which makes it so she has to do more work to teach students about appropriate social behaviors in her class. She also mentioned that the aggressiveness of the curriculum has made it so that the gap between the kids has gotten more exaggerated and more pronounced-meaning the students who are quick to understanding things get bored if they take it slow for the rest of the kids, but the kids who are slower to understanding struggle even more because the material is inherently aggressive. Ms. Brown handles that during Language Arts by giving them a couple tasks to work on and then giving them a long list of options for other choices they can make when they're done. She was mentioning today that she wants to get more new books and have some more different options because some of the students are still getting bored but she can't really assign more work because there are some students who struggle to finish everything as is. A couple of the kids who struggle to finish I've worked with a little bit and I can tell they are really smart kids and they're not struggling to finish because they don't understand the material, but because they have a hard time focusing with all the other things going on in the classroom. With the kids who really struggle staying on task, she'll sometimes have them pull their desk away if they're distracting other people or send them to work one on one with me so they can have some accountability to help them stay focused.
After recess, Ms. Brown got all the kids in a circle to play a game called "Sparkle" with the students to help them work on their spelling words in a group. Ms. Brown told them the word they'd be spelling and then they'd go around the circle and each person would take a turn saying a letter to spell that word and if they said the wrong letter, they had to sit down. After they finished spelling the word, the next person would say "Sparkle!" and the person after them would have to sit down. One thing I observed in this cooperative learning activity is that they would all help each other if someone got stuck on one of the letters. I loved this cooperative learning game because it helped raise everyone up-the people who were quick on the spelling were able to help the other students which would help cement the spelling even further in their own minds, and the people who were slower to spell the words would get help and be able to get it the next time around without as much help. I thought this activity compared to the more individual learning activity they did before recess was a good example of how Ms. Brown differentiates the learning experience to help out her students with different learning styles and abilities.