Session 2

Mrs. Nero's Kindergarten class seems to be set up exactly how a Georgia Pre-K class is. I taught pre-k for 7 years, and we pretty much followed the exact schedule as in the case study. Her classroom environment seems super organized, and it seems that all of the children know what is expected of them.
I feel like she did a great job incorporating literacy into each of her centers. Many times, when others think of "center time" they automatically think of playing and having fun. I think allowing children to learn through playing is SO important. It may look like they are just playing house in the home living center but they are also exploring and building on past experiences, comfortably testing out and picking up new vocabulary, and learning throughout the process. One of my favorite parts about teaching pre-k was swapping out my dramatic play center each month. We had things from grocery stores, to coffee shops, to pumpkin patches, to Santa's workshop. Giving them free reign to explore these things while also providing literacy rich materials to them such as pads for making lists, menus to order from, remotes with numbers and a "tv guide", catalogs, etc. to me is so important to their development!
I also read some things that made me think of ways to improve my own classroom. Journaling is something that I feel like was a big thing when I was in elementary school. My mom has my old journals and I loved looking through them to see how my writing developed each year. I DID do journals in my classroom as a pre-k teacher. They came in each morning and wrote their names twice, and once they mastered that they moved on to drawing pictures and labeling, but this is something I have never implemented in my first grade classroom. I feel like somewhere along the way I read a study, or heard someone speak negatively on this topic, saying journals are not an effective tool for literacy development. This is something I need to look and research more about. I would love to implement this into my morning routine, because I think it would be a great tool to use to show writing growth through the year. I am definitely going to give more thought and do more reading about journaling.