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Teaching Experience

Running Head: TEACHING EXPERIENCE/REFLECTION PAPER

Margaret Carter
MAT 534
Teaching Experience

In order to be a successful educator, it is important to reflect upon one’s teaching. This may include videotaping classes, being observed by a colleague, asking for help with a problem or finding new ways to teach a topic. Being a reflective teacher is something I have tried to be while student teaching and plan to continue working on. The activity that I performed with my group of students is called the Peanut Butter and Jelly dance. This lesson took about 35-40 minutes to implement. I started off with giving the students some information on what it is that we were going to be doing. I then gave some background information about the lesson. I tried to elicit prior knowledge from the students by creating a KWL chart with the students on where peanut butter and jelly comes from. In conducting this lesson I wanted to make sure that the language used was suitable for the age group and that the information wasn’t too hard or too easy for the children. So I did my research and everything turned out okay. I think that the students had a lot of fun with the lesson because they interacted very well.
The objective of my lesson was to teach the students how to use non verbal body language in the form of a dance in order to make up the sandwich. Nonverbal “channels” of communication (how something is said) are often more important than words alone (what is said). There are many different "channels" of nonverbal communication: facial expressions, hand gestures, body movements ("kinesics"), touch ("haptics"), and personal space (Exploring Nonverbal Communication, 2005). These are the channels that were explored within our activity. Secondly, to provide students with a little history of where the peanut butter and jelly came from and how it was created. Students will be able to associate peanuts and grapes with the...

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