Observing the Nursery Class - Essay Example

03 October Observation 3 It was the nursery The teacher had arranged the students in groups of 5. Since there were 25 students in total, the teacher arranged them into 5 groups. Each group had been formed in such a way that there was at least one very capable student, at least two low-achieving students, and two average students. The teacher brought five teddy bear toys with her to the class. The teddy bear toys were such that they counted numbers. The teacher had brought them with the intention to help the weak students do the counting although everybody in the group in general was free to play with the teddy bear toys.

The children were supposed to count the digits that appeared on rolling a die. The activity was meant to check and enhance the counting skills of the students. The teacher used this activity to achieve this because the children had expressed interest in learning counting this way a day before. Each of the five students was required to roll the dice on his/her turn three times and sum up the digits that appeared on rolling the dice each time so that the final number would be the sum of the digits appearing in three different attempts.

The children seemed very happy doing this activity. The teacher organized the activity in the form of groups. This not only provided the teacher with greater control over the activity but was also very convenient for the low-achieving students as they had got a chance to work with the high-achieving students. The activity in the form of a group was also very useful since there were just 5 teddy bears. Had the teacher decided to conduct the activity in a disintegrated manner or had there been no groups, it would have been hard for the teacher to make sure that every student had at least one chance of playing with the teddy bear.

As the children conducted the activity, the teacher moved over to the groups one after another to extend her hand of help to any group that might be in need of it. The group activity was no less useful for the high-achieving students as they had been provided with a chance to teach others the concepts that they felt were hard to understand otherwise. I frequently noticed the high-achieving students helping others. They felt nice since this was a unique opportunity for them. Last but not the least, the activity taught the children group skills.

While the students conducted the math activity in groups, the teacher hovered over them so as to make sure that in each group, each student was participating equally and that all students were getting an equal chance of playing with the teddy bears. In one group, a student was very bossy and was not letting others play. The other students brought the matter to the teacher’s attention. The teacher used a guidance approach to make the bossy student share the toy with others.