Hi!
Welcome back to the teaching practice 2021 series!
Today I would like to focus on the classroom routines in the 1st grade which I had a chance to observe for a while during my practice. As I said before the classes were conducted in the remote mode which made it hard for me to observe a perfect classroom routine but certainly I could see some elements of it.
First of all when kids were entering the virtual room, they were saying "hello" to the teacher and she answered them. It was a very nice and warm "Good morning/afternoon". Then the teacher was calling missing students using MS Teams to remind them about the English class. At the very beginning, there was also a short chat about how the children are feeling today and how was their Easter break.
I quickly realized that my mentor teacher is using attention signals. She was counting "3,2,1..." to grab students' attention. If children need help while doing exercises in their workbooks they can raise their hand using MS Teams tool. In my opinion, it was a good way to see if they are ready with the task or need the teacher's attention. If someone finished faster than others there was a possibility to do another task from the book. The main consequence of unfinished work was doing it as homework.
From my observations, I know the teacher sets homework from time to time. The pupils mark it in the book (circle) and note it down in the notebooks. The Mentor teacher checks the homework together with the kids. They write points for good answers and correct mistakes.
To sum up, I like this cute "good morning/afternoon" a lot. When the teacher introduced me at the first class, the kids were noticing my presence and they said "hello" to me every time. I am a big fan of attention grabbers and would prefer using rhyming words to keep students focused. One of them is "T: hocus pocus... S:... everybody focus" which is my favourite. As a teacher, I think I would not like to set homework to my students but I enjoyed how my mentor teacher was giving feedback and points to kids after checking it. They seemed to be very happy about it.
What about you? Did you observe any classroom routines during your practice?
Let me know in the comments.
Zuzanna
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