The impact of my field experiences on my course learning....

I have really enjoyed my observations/field experiences of the classroom. They have definitely impacted my learning for the course. The observations have helped improve my learning of language arts in the K-6

classroom. I was able to learn about reading and writing workshops in class and then go to the school and actually get to experience these strategies for language arts instruction in the actual classroom. I was able to see the benefits and happy faces of the students that were taking part in the reading and writing workshops.

I was pleased to see that this method of teaching language arts was very beneficial for the students. Mrs. Smith even told me that student testing had improved when they implemented reading and writing workshops into their curriculum. Most of the times when I went to observe, there were few discipline problems and I could tell students were interested in the reading and writing workshops. I think it is great that students can choose what they want to read and that they have a lot of free time during the day to write. I have truly fallen in love with the children in Mrs. Smith's classroom, and they made my experience even more enjoyable. I loved listening to their comments to Mrs. Smith's minilessons and how creative they were with their stories they wrote in their writing workshop.

My reflections show how much I learned from my observations. Usually my reflections were very long because of how much I experienced in the classroom that I had learned from my Education 300 course. This semester I learned and observed reading and writing workshops. From my observations I also learned about fractured fairy tales, biographies, story elements, fables, narratives, and inferencing and drawing conclusions. I thought Mrs. Smith was a very dedicated teacher who wanted the children to succeed. I thought Powell elementary was a good school that I might like to work at in the future. My overall observations allowed me to experience what I learned in Education 300 in a third grade classroom with actual third graders.