1.Teaching Diverse Students

This artifact is called: Kindness Anchor Chart in Room 218. It contains positive comments about each student that is in the second-grade classroom of 218. The students took turns expressing a positive and kind comment about their peers. This artifact was produced and created during Kindness Week during Valentine’s day week of which the school Ridge Lawn participated in. We began the 13th of February and added to the chart, adding a comment for all students and teachers in room 218. This was created to encourage and spread kindness to each and every individual in the school.

The importance of this artifact that was created was to embrace kindness and express positive qualities and differences about every individual. The students each took part and shared a positive quality about all the students in the class. Specifically, students brainstormed a list of positive words such as, caring, funny and used those words to support their thinking during the activity. This was also to create positive relationships amongst peers and staff as a community.  This artifact also supports students social and emotional well-being. This artifact shows the importance and understanding of the performance indicator 1K) it states “facilitates a learning community in which individual differences are respected; and” (1K). This indicator expresses within the standard that this particular activity demonstrates a wide learning community, where all members of the classroom are shown respect and kindness and encourage a positive environment for all to learn. Teaching diverse learners and understanding their characteristics and abilities creates positive experiences in all settings such as their academics and social emotional well-being.

What was learned from this activity was inclusion and encouragement in creating a safe and positive learning environment. This activity taught me as an educator how important it is to build community values within the classroom and school as a whole. It is important to my development as a teacher because of all the diverse learners I will be teaching. Each student has positive qualities that should be embraced and respected. This activity allowed the students to share and support one another in a communicative environment sharing and spreading kindness. As I enter the education world, building a community where all can learn and be proud of who they are is a goal of mine. This activity allowed all students to work together and facilitate a positive environment where all differences are respected and supported. I plan to use this activity in my future classes to encourage and celebrate every student of their unique qualities and differences.

This lesson was created on March 15th, 2023 for my second grade class. I had the opportunity to create a reading lesson for my second observation. This lesson focused on the importance and significance of: President’s Day. This lesson was produced to teach the students in identifying key details of the text using WH questions as well as learning to describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges. In this artifact, I have the lesson posted that I created, along with a KWL graphic organizer and two final products of which the students created.

The importance of the artifact chosen shows evidence of constructive and effective thinking while using the reading story: “Duck for President” along with material taught of what is President’s Day. For example: Students using evidence from the story had to decide using effective and critical thinking why Duck should or should not be President. As a pre-reading strategy, we created a T chart as an extra resource to support the student's reasoning of whether they agreed or disagreed. The students also also shared and paired with one another and created deeper discussions as well it extended their thinking. This lesson meets the standard because it shows how the student is able to identify important facts and connect to material taught about the President to the story that was read by using the information from the graphic organizer and problem solve what the appropriate solution would be and why. The indicator 1B states, “understands how each student constructs knowledge, acquires skills, and develops effective and efficient critical thinking and problem- solving capabilities” (1B). This standard supports the diversity that is expressed in our world, the leadership we have and being able to create and develop positive academic experiences to support and encourage student learning.

This particular lesson allowed students to explore and be creative in their thinking and learning of the diversity of leadership our country has. The students were able to create thoughts, wonderings and use information to record it on the KWL graphic organizer. This allowed the students to express information they knew prior, questions they may wonder about and information they learned from content that was taught, as well as what they learned from reading the story which students could connect with. I used these moments that were taught in this lesson to be able to create opportunities to expand their learning and understanding of President’s Day. I believe the learning I experienced in this lesson supported my understanding of supporting the students in learning how the President makes a difference in our lives and our country as a whole. I believe this lesson connects to my future classroom because students as they get older will be learning about the important elements of social studies and diversity. It was important for me to give my students an opportunity to engage and dig deep into the significance of President’s Day.