Berea Community Classroom Expirience

This is a picture of my PEH 220 class on our field trip to Berea Community School.

On October 2, 2008 I took a trip with my PEH 220 course to Berea Community School. It was a really great experience to be able to go into the class room and see real students and teachers using movement in order to create a better learning environment. This experience has really helped me to tie the things we had previously talked about in class in with a real classroom situation, given that this class is all about bringing more movement and activity into the classroom. We had been going over several developing educational topics in this class, for example the significance of brain dance or juggling to improve learning and even reading skills, but before actually seeing the teacher use things like brain gym and the lazy eight exercises in her classroom, I really wasn’t sure how these concepts would work out with a classroom full of twenty children at the age of seven. However, contrary to my prior belief that the students would get a little out of hand and just get a bit too excited, I was able to see how wonderfully doing these exercises together in the classroom works. Not only that, but it was great to see how much the children loved doing it.

From this classroom experience, I also took away a couple of things I would like to use in my own classroom someday. For example, I really enjoyed the fact that the children had different stations that they got to participate in, all of which incorporated a fun way to practice literacy and spelling. I also thought the shower curtain game they played in the class was a really fun way to go about learning. With this activity, you lay out a shower curtain and place spelling words all over it. Then the child takes a small bean bag and throws it onto one of the words. Then the child gets to pick that word up and read what it says. I also really liked that it would be easy to change this up in order to encompass other subject matter. For example, you could use math problems rather than spelling words. Over all I really thought this was a wonderful experience. It’s really great to get a better understanding of being inside the classroom with children of that age and seeing the things we have discussed in class put to use in a learning environment.

I would put this experience into the professional development category. I believe that it is very important to use opportunities such as this to get the feeling of what it is truly like to be inside an elementary school classroom. During our college years, I believe it is a vital time to take any chance we get to travel to different classrooms and have as much experience with children as we possibly can. After all, this does give us a glimpse into our own future as teachers, plus it gives us the chance to learn a few tricks for the future from the professionals.