Jordan Suber PPAT Task 1

Textbox 1.1.1: Community, District, School Contextual Factors That Influence Instruction A) The community factor that I feel is most relevant to my students and my classroom environment would have to be the economic status of the community. There are so many areas around the community that are drowned in poverty and most of my students are residents in those areas. It is important that our students build their confidence, self-respect, and a sense of community in our classroom. An instructional strategy that I would adapt to my schedule would be a PIE (Positive, Informative, and Exciting) Social in the morning. We would have a social meeting in the mornings when they get to school to discuss, Positive, Informative, or Exciting information they may have. I would have the students say Good morning to a neighbor and give someone in the room a compliment of some kind. This would help build their sense of community as well as sense of respect for others. By having the students complement each other once a day; this would help in building the students self esteem and appreciation. The learning activity I would implement into my classroom would be to do a Beautify Laurens Elementary day. I would have a community worker who works with the recycling center come in and talk with the students about how littering and neglect to our community can affect their living and health. After hearing our speaker, we would go around the school collecting any trash we may find and dispose of it the proper way. We may also plant a garden or flower bed somewhere around the school to go along with a science unit on plant adaptations. They are beautifying the school while learning about science. This would build social opportunities for the students that they may miss out on while at home. Most of my students come from low social environments at

Jordan Suber PPAT Task 1

home, where they do not have the chances to have their voices heard. By having them participate in a morning meeting, it will allow those bright ideas and thoughts to fill our classroom. B) The district factor that I choose to address is classroom diversity. Our school district is made up of students from many ethnic backgrounds. I feel that it is vital that our students are considerate and knowledgeable of the fact that people are different in many ways. They must understand a different color or speaking a different language or being from a different place is totally okay. Instructional strategies I would use would be to have students of different ethnic backgrounds work together to collect information on a certain culture. It is important that they learn about the different cultures within our class, as well as others that may be highly populated within the school district. The learning activity I would have the students complete, would be to have the students create their own Living Wax Museum where they talk about different cultures to the class while performing their own 1 minute skit. They will be assigned a famous person from different cultures to research information on and present back to our class. The living wax museum would consist of them having to dress as that person or bring an artifact that their famous person used or designed and tell us in 1-2 minutes their rehearsed skit. This will bring in historical accomplishments, made by people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds. C) The school factor I chose is Pass Performance in third grade. The subject area that had the highest percentage of third graders not meet the proper average was Math in my school with a 50.6% not met. Since the Common Core Standards are based off of students number sense, thats what I would focus on. In third grade the standards have

Jordan Suber PPAT Task 1

our children apply their number sense knowledge to explore patterns and relationships between addition and subtraction and multiplication and division. I would use the instructional strategy of hands on learning activities to help them with math strategies that are connected to real life situations. The learning activity I would have them complete is a gallery walk. The Common Core standards discuss inquiry and studentcentered learning, since exploration and pattern recognition can be easily done through class discussion. I will divide my students into groups of four, and give each group a piece of chart paper. Then I will hand an equation to each group (8 X 6 = 48). I will then challenge each group to come up with ten different ways to get the answer (in the case of the example, 48) using addition, multiplication and division all in five minutes. Each group will record their equations on the chart paper. Once the time is up we will have a Gallery Walk where the groups walk around the class observing their classmates work while giving feedback to groups they visited. This will offer a sense of community, class collaboration, and math exploration.