A Classroom Observation Report A Music Lesson at Rosedale Elementary School

Rosedale Elementary school is not a very ethnically diverse elementary school with 90% percent of the students being either Hispanic or White. I don’t think that this is on purpose because we are in California and the two ethnic classifications are the ones that seem to clearly dominate in the open population. This is also not too surprising because in the text we learned that “by 2012, 45 percent of public school students are considered to be part of a racial or ethnic minority group (Koch, 2014, p.

90)” the main group being Hispanics. More than half the students are on a free or reduced lunch program. This makes me think that the income level of the families that send their children here are closer to the poverty line than one would like to see. A little less than half of the students are English learners, I assume they are learning English from Spanish, since the school is a Spanish emersion school.

The parent education is all across the board, they are all spread out across the board in the means that just as many parents went to high school and graduated as those who didn’t and the same ratio extends to who went to college and graduated and not as well as to parents that continued to postgraduate education.

The elementary school doesn’t seem to be too new. The facility does show some minor wear and tear but there is not significant crippling damages. Everything seems to be 100% functional and used appropriately.

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Something that stands out to me are the signs that are in Spanish they seem to serve as more learning tools than anything, they do casually pass as decoration. What I mean when I say that the signs serve as learning tools is that they are mostly labels to the bathroom, fountains, rooms, and recreational areas, and other mundane things like soap dispensers and all these signs are in Spanish. “Among children who speak a different language other than English at home, Spanish is the language most frequently spoken (Koch, 2014, p. 91)”

Besides the school being Spanish emersion, this fact completely justifies the Spanish posters. Because of this I am inclined to believe that if the elementary school were not for Spanish emersion or a bilingual school those signs wouldn’t be there because they aren’t really needed since if you’re a student or a faculty or just a literate person you know that a fountain is a fountain, no sign is needed. Another thing that popped out to me when walking around Rosedale elementary were posters for school merchandise, when I saw those my mind immediately jumps to fundraisers. When I think about fundraising my mind often drifts to the idea of need and that perhaps the school may not be completely well funded for their needs. I think about this especially since school has been in for a while and so the initial need to advertise school spirit has kind of expired but it is still early enough in the year to where I don’t really think that there is any major expenses that are needed.

The classroom that I am in is a kindergarten class. In the classroom there are only about 20 children, there are slightly more girls than boys. Language is the biggest room for diversity in the classroom at this point. There are students who very obviously started the school year monolingual either just either just speaking English or just Spanish, however it isn’t surprising to me because I think that helps with the Spanish emersion plan the school has for the students. Another reason the multilinguistic abilities the children have or lack is that more than half the children are Hispanic. It’s interesting to see that even at this very young age the students already have distinct personalities and those seem to show up in their learning styles. I’ve noticed that the boys have a little less control over their bodies and get riled up easier so moving activities are a little harder to keep them concentrated with. I have seen that the louder children with more confidence ask for approval of their assignments more regularly throughout the activities while the shier children will wait to be prompted to do things and ask less questions and putting the two different learners together seems to help the children stay on track of their activities.

Observation

The class time that I observed was music time. This was the first music class so the teacher introduced herself to the class at the very beginning and she, I’ll call her Mrs. Smith. Since it was the first day the children were sort of shy so Mrs. Smith started out with some ice breaking questions, she asked if the kids liked music and it they listened to music at home and she was very casual about it. Something she did in the beginning as well was to invite the kids to sit in a circle so they could all see her and nobody was particularly standing out. Eventually she had some questions that led to what she was going to be doing, she asked if they liked dancing because they were going to be dancing. She mostly was teaching the kids phrases. The way she went about this was she had a song prepared to have the kids dance to. First she instructed the children to dance while the music was playing and freeze when the music stopped and it went across very smoothly.

What she did next was instruct the children to recall where she had stopped the music and next time around she would play the music and they would dance as it played but freeze where the music should stop. With this plan Mrs. Smith taught the children to recognize phrases and patterns. The instruction involved a variety of modes. This activity was good for kinesthetic learners who “learn best through hands on approach, actively exploring the physical world around them (Koch, 2014, p. 104)”, this activity gave the students an opportunity to dance and move around. The exercise also involved the listening skills of the children because they had to pay attention to the phrases in the music. Mrs. Smith showed empathy respect and caring when she called on students’ names and listened to what they had to say about their own experiences with music, they fact that she asked them casual questions showed empathy.

Something else I noticed was that she was constantly smiling and praising the students on their listening skills, I thought that was a good way to keep the attention and have the children feel like they were having a genuine connection with the teacher. There was an incident where there was a boy that decided he wasn’t going to participate and he just laid on the ground, this stood out to me because nobody referenced the issue until after the music teacher left and the main instructor let him know that wasn’t the best behavior for the guest instructor. This was disheartening because I know that the boy probably didn’t get the most out of the lesson and he was probably confused and that’s why he stopped. The incident was distraction to the other students as well but the activity just continued anyway. The teacher closed the class by having all the children sit in a circle and asking if they knew what a phrase was and then telling them that what they had done was in the spirit of learning just that and they were all pretty proud of themselves for learning something new.

The closing part of the activity was great because it got to get the auditory learners involved who “learn best through verbal lectures, discussions, talking things through, and listening to what others have to say (Koch, 2014, p. 104)”

Reflection Questions

I know that I am not the most patient person and I take it personally when my instructions aren’t understood the first time because I feel like I am failing at something. My biggest worry when I am around young children is hurting their feelings because I get impatient and that might translate as me disliking the students when it’s not the case. From what I observed, I learned that providing feedback keeps the children interested, they really respond to positive reinforcement when Mrs. Smith would let them know they were doing something right. I liked the sitting the children in a circle idea because that way you can see all the children at the same time. Something else that Mrs. Smith used was an attention grabber she called “four on the floor” where the children freeze, crisscross applesauce, eyes on the teacher, and listen; I think I’ll definitely use this trick one day or something to that effect.