Taking Turns While Creating Bead Patterns: Case #33. This case shows a teacher guiding students to work in pairs to string beads in order to create AB patterns and students working in pairs, taking turns, and stringing beads . This field experience starts off with with Pre-K students in a group of six sitting at a circular table. I like how they were sitting in a circular table so that all of the students could see each other. The table also offers a great area for discussion, the middle of the table has an opening for the teacher to be in also. The teacher then starts off with asking her students , ‘How do you share’ and after that she introduces her activity.
She shows the students three piles of string and there are six people in the group. The students are very confused at this point and they don’t know what to do. The teacher than ask the students what they should do and the one girl says, “We Need to Share”. So she divided the children in groups of two and gave them beads. One color for one partner and the other for the other one. She then uses the first group as an example. The boy and girl take turns putting beads on the string and the teacher tells them to tell the person once its their turn. As this was going on I observed the last group and the one boy kept getting distracted and playing with the string. Through the activity the teacher was very helpful and spent time equally with each group. The first group never needed help , the second group was on task but didn’t always share and the third group never started until the teacher helped them.
It is so interesting to observe children because all of them think differently , act differently and learn differently. I really enjoyed this learning activity because the teacher was so uplifting and at the end everybody got to ring a bell saying they shared. This was a cool touch because it showed the kids they did it! I will take these observations and add it to my future ideas of teaching.
School & Society ~ Kayley 