Elementary School Teaching Tools

Video Transcript

"This word is they'll. T H E Y apostrophe L L. What do you think it is? That's right. They will. One of the advantages we have over the teachers when I was young is that we have a lot of tools presently accessible. My classroom is technologically beyond anything that I would imagine my teachers had dreamed of. I can do something on my computer, it'll show on the television screen, it'll show on the projector, onto the front wall. We can watch it 8 by 10 if we wanted to. So we have that advantage. We have the computer labs available. Of course based on curriculum, now the Basals that they're giving us, it's not just a book that the teacher can read from. But it's that and it's a listening library and they've got vocabulary cards. We're given everything we really need to do the job on it's most basic level. We have manipulatives in the classroom. Field trips are a great opportunity for the kids to experience additional things so they're reading will be richer. We have specialists for math, specialists for reading. People coming in and helping out with small group tutoring. Manipulatives are anything they can move with their hand. So like maybe if they were sound out the word cut. We would pull down, for each sound they hear we would pull down a different cube, so it might be c u t. Just so they can see that there are three different sounds in that one word and then we blend it together. Or math manipulatives where we'll have the block that represents one thousand. They'll have the square that represents one hundred. The base ten block that represents ten and then the little cubits that represent one. So it's just manipulatives so they can see it in one more way while they're trying to learn it. This year we were studying for our summer school session. We were doing a trip to ancient Rome and the fourth grade was doing a trip to ancient Greece. So we have the Parthenon right here in Nashville, so we went and visited the Parthenon and we went around into Centennial Park and we had a scavenger hunt at Centennial Park. We also went to Kentucky Down Under during the school year and the kids got to see Australia, Kentucky-style, which was special. Lot's of museums. Walking trails, things like that. Just taking them out in nature sometimes as well."