Step by step (prevod)

1. Hello, my name is Linda Kunesh.

2. I’m the director of early childhood and family education at NCREL, the North Central
Regional Educational Laboratory.
3. During the 1991/92 school year NCREL developed a video series entitled “Schools that work
- the research advantage”.
4. “Schools that work” illustrates how teachers have applied the latest research about
teaching and learning to their own practice.
5. For that series we visited and video-taped many classrooms in communities across the
country.
6. One of the classrooms is David Burchfield’s first grade in rural Virginia.
7. David translates developmentally appropriate practice into an exciting learning experience
for his students.
8. The program you are about to see provides an expanded look inside David’s classroom.
9. In addition, David responds to questions raised by a group of teachers.
10. This program is brought to you by the National Association for the Education of Young
Children and NCREL.
11. We hope you will enjoy it!

DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE FIRST GRADE: A COMMMUNITY OF LEARNERS

12. The first segment we will be watching is what we call a morning work time.
13. The schedule for the day is really important, I think, to the way the children learn.
14. It’s a balance of teacher directed times and child directed times.
15. I see most of the different times of the day as being structures that I set up in which the
children have some freedom.
16. So it’s some kind of idea of freedom within structure.

8:00 am MORNING WORK TIME

17. We call the first part of the day a 'morning work time'. It lasts an hour or 90 minutes and the
children must complete a specific assignment or two. Sometimes we allow them to spend
this time on projects they choose for themselves.
18. For example, right now while we’re studying folk tales the children might be creating or
putting on a play for the rest of the class, practicing a puppet play.
19. They might be working in a block area, working on a computer, reading, writing, doing art,
listening in the listening center, a variety of activities.
20. So a lot of what’s goes on in the beginning of the day is child initiated and child directed.
21. Mike, Amanda has brought a bunny rabbit to class, and over here this morning there was a
piece of paper where you should sign if you want to join in the puppet play.
22. And there is a castle being built in the block area.
23. OK, so there’s a lot … so you can make a choice.
24. The bunny rabbit was brought in spontaneously that morning by a family and the mother
came in with a child and said: ”You said that my daughter could bring the bunny rabbit in”.
25. And so it would be counter-productive to say “Sorry, take the rabbit home!”.
26. …it would be more useful to go ahead and let her have that investment in that activity.
27. And she facilitated, we got some books, they went down to the library and checked out
some books on rabbits and they came back and they spent the whole hour looking at the
rabbit and talking about the rabbit, and she shared a lot with the children.
28. Now, when these children are making choices, what if they continue to make the same
choices, how do you encourage them to make diverse choices?
29. Well, there is always a handful of kids in the classroom who have a difficult time making
choices and they surface very quickly.
30. With those kids who do have trouble making learning choices at the beginning of the year,
we go over and over what is a good learning choice in the classroom, and they quickly learn,
for example, that running a car around on a floor is not a good learning choice.
31. You can do that kind of thing at home, but in this classroom there are more interesting
choices to make. For example, we explain to the children the procedures for using the block
area or the math and science area, the library area, and than they learn to kind of make of
their own, to make the classroom a place where they can live and make good learning
 choices.
32. For those children who can’t make good learning choices I negotiate something else with
them, either because it’s something they are doing time after time or it’s just something
that’s obviously not a productive learning choice.
33. They often know that.
34. Children know when they are wasting their time.
35. Listen to my question, OK?
36. How long do you think it will take for the ball to go from the top all the way to the bottom?
Start when I say 'go' and I will count... 'go': one, two, three, four.
37. Mike, don’t drop it!
38. Listen to my question!
39. How long do you think it will take for the ball to go from the top all the way down to the
bottom?
40. Brendon guesses twenty, what do you think?
41. I would say fifteen.
42. Fifteen, a little lower.
43. What do you think?
44. I’d say sixteen.
45. About sixteen… what do you think?
46. Ten.
47. Ten, little lower.
48. OK, now wait, ready?
49. I will start counting when you drop the ball: one, two, three, keep with me, four, that’s good,
everybody clap, ready?
50. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, hold it,
fourteen, fifteen, it stopped.
51. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one.
52. Who was closest?
53. That was good estimating.
54. You were all very close!
55.
56. Good!
57. But the final number was another ten higher than you estimated, wasn’t it?
58. In this situation, I wanted to get them to estimate a particular number and the strategy for
counting was not so important, the aim was to get them to estimate a particular length.
59. .
60. So, that’s what came to my mind in that particular situation.
61. If you are working with some children in one area how do you monitor what the other
children are doing?
62. Well, the classroom is set up in such a way that at any time I can have a visual scan of the
area to monitor what’s going on.
63. Also, our municipality believed that our teaching should take account of the children's
current level of development, so our practices are appropriate for them.
64. So many years ago we took a lot of research to the board, and they gave us enough funds
to have teaching assistants in the classrooms, for children in early childhood up to the first
grade level.
65. That made a significant impact, having an extra adult in the classroom during the morning.
66. Do the children have time limitations, meaning that they can only spend a certain amount of
time in each area?
67. Is there a rotation of the areas within this hour?
68. What is a span of time?
69. Kids learn better when they have enough time to consider things in depth. So for example
ten minutes is too short.
70. So, if a child wants to write for an hour in the morning, I let them write.
71. If they want to work on that puppet play, for example, they can use most of the hour to
prepare, and then put on the production right before the end of the work time.
72. All of those children were engaged for that whole time in the puppet play
73. There was a whole group that was working for the whole hour in the block area, working as
a team.
74. I believe it’s more valuable to have them dwelling in something for a longer period of time.
75. One comment that I have about this morning work time: I think that it’s really important
 especially for young children to have opportunities to initiate and plan and direct some of
their own work and play.
76. A good deal of research shows that play for young children is things that they have the
opportunity to initiate and have been involved in guiding.
77. And this relates to the locus of control in the classroom.
78. Throughout the day you will notice there is balance between what I think is important and
what children think is important.

9:40 am MUSIC TIME

79. You and many others live here too.

80. The earth is our home.
81. It’s where we live, super.
82. OK, you are ready?
83. The line "The earth is our home" is sung very fast.
84. There’s a big beautiful planet in the sky, it’s my home, it’s where I live; you and many
others live here too, the earth is our home, It’s where we live.
85. Music is a very important part of my teaching program.
86. We sing daily.
87. This song is happening during our group time in the middle of the morning.
88. We have the words on screen which helps me to instruct the kids.
89. Where do the vocabulary words come from, are they words of the song based on something
else you are teaching the kids and you incorporate the vocabulary into the song?
90. No, it’s just singing for the sake of singing.
91. I don’t see that everything we do in classroom has to be directly related to a unit.
92. But at the same time they are learning these vocabulary words and improving their reading
skills.
93. Yes, I hope so.
94. It’s certainly language enrichment.
95. I personally like music a lot and use it throughout the day.

10:10 AM MATH FOCUS

96. Now, this is the math workshop or math focus time.

97. Right now we are focusing on the idea of measurement in our classroom.
98. We are putting the children in different situations where they can develop competence with
nonstandard measurement, meaning not using rulers but some other standard than the inch
or the centimeter.
99. We are measuring things around our classroom.
100. Children are choosing what they would like to measure.
101. They are working in pairs, measuring a variety of real objects in the classroom with unifix
cubes.
102. They write their information down and they spell as best they can so there’s literacy
involved in the activity.
103. And then we get together at the end of the time and share what we found and report
back in a sense to the group.
104. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.
105. In that particular situation Brandon was helping or working with Jason.
106. And Jason is a very special child.
107. He had a series of health problems over the course of his life that caused a disability.
108. He just loves Brandon, and admires him, and Brandon was very capable in math. This is
why I often let the children self-select their partner.
109. I use a lot of buddies in the classroom.
110. With very young children I think it’s really, often it’s difficult to form even a small group
and ask them to cooperate.
111. I really think a lot of cooperative learning strategy is wonderful, but with very young
children asking four or five children to work together sometimes is very difficult.
112. So buddies are used in the classroom or either self-selected or I try to pair them.
113. Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, I mean ninety-seven and the half.
114. Taaab-le, table.
10:45 SHARE CIRCLE

115. Nice big share-circle please.

116. At the end of the morning work time, at the end of math or reading focus, at the end of
readers-writers workshop and then at the end of the day, we have a time for coming
together as a group again to talk about what we have learned, to share learning strategies
whether it’s in reading, or to share pieces in writing.
117. We use chairs, for example what we call “the authors chair, readers chair”.
118. We use a chair where somebody has really worked through something and they come to
a conclusion or publish something, or they have made a major discovery, we let them share
in front of the class that way.
119.
120. In a less formal circle we move around the circle from child to child letting everyone
share maybe one thing with the group, for example here in this math ask the children to
read one thing they measured and how many it was, so that one child doesn’t dominate.
121. Let’s be good listeners for one another.
122. Ann and Lauren, why don’t you share, take turns OK, and each person share one thing.
123. … ten …unifix cubes.
124. Do you know what I saw you do right there?
125. You corrected, you didn’t say inches, you knew what your measure was, that’s great!
126. …and the bookshelf over there was seventy five unifix cubes.
127. How did you get all that to stand up?
128. Well Lauren had to hold it, it fell down a lot.
129. We tried to measure it, they said it was seventy, we said it was different.
130. We started from the floor.
131.
132. We started from the top.
133. And did you just measure to the bottom of the blue part?
134. OK, so that explains, that explains what?
135. Difference.
136. The difference, great.
137. If there is a disagreement I like to let the kids talk it out.
138. I try to step back and let them just talk and sometimes try to negotiate or lead them to a
correct answer, if there is a correct answer, and sometimes there isn't because the problem
I give them allows different answers.
139.
140. So for example, here the goal was not so much measuring strategies, instead it was to
report and read at first grade level.
141. Reading your spellings of the things you measured and then reading the numbers you
wrote down, reporting about the variety of things that were measured in the classroom.
142. If the task was to find a strategy for measurement I might say, “we are going to measure
these things and you find the ways that you would like to measure them”.
143. So that would be more strategy, then.
144. At this point I think it was more just reading and reporting back to the group about the
data we collected in the room.

11:00 PHYSICAL EDUCATION

145. We have a physical education time.

146. That is also my planning time, which is really essential.
147. That’s the time when I communicate with other teachers who I teach with and maybe just
make some phone calls, do some other things that you need to do to operate the classroom.

11:30 READERS & WRITERS WORKSHOP

148. Are you all ready?

149. I am showing you the title page.
150. Later during the morning we have a time called “readers and writers workshop” which is
very much based on research by some important people in the fields of reading and writing:
Lucy Cocans, Donald Graves, Jerry Hursty, Tom Newcork.
151. And what we do during that time is we have an hour of the day that’s devoted specifically
 to literacy development.
152. We begin in what is sometimes called a “mini-lesson”.
153. This is where we get together in a small, close group, and you might read a short book,
look at the book, look at an illustration; you might share something that the children are
doing.
154. When it gets to this part it’s time to just raise your hand and I’ll point to you and you
could do the part, ready?
155. When the wheat was all cut, the little red hen asked "Now, who will take this wheat to
the mill to be ground in to flour?"
156.
157. Amanda, the cat, ready?
158. Mieow - said the cat.
159. Woof - said the dog.
160. Eek - said the mouse.
161. Then "I will" – said the little red hen, and she did.
162. Often we get together and do a simple 'idea share'.
163. We talk about the topics we have been reading and writing about. One of the many
challenges when teaching writing skills to young children is to ensure that that topic choice
is not made out of a vacuum.
164. They have to have something to rehearse with, whether it’s a drawing or Lego
construction or a model that they made out of clay.
165. There is something there that stimulates their idea.
166. And so we try to give kids lots of that stimulus.
167. I’m going to work … my trapper keeper.
168. In your trapper keeper do you have the story that you writing in there? OK.
169. Warren? You work on your story that you began.
170. What was your story about?
171. Hansel and Gretel.
172. Hansel and Gretel?
173. It's good that you want to re-tell the stories we are studying.
174. Amanda?
175. … and the bunny.
176. OK, then we can get do some work about your bunny and maybe put a little book
together about your bunny, right.
177. Mike?
178. Write.
179. You going to write.
180. And you could get a piece of paper and do some drawing first, OK.
181. John?
182. Journal.
183. OK.
184. Tu?
185. Henny-Penny I am working on.
186. You working on Henny-Penny, right.
187. You reading it or writing it?
188. I’m writing it.
189. You’re writing your own version, yes.
190. …
191. You just finished, in fact I would like you to share Hansel and Gretel story later today.
192. We have a lot to share.
193. We have a lot to write and read about today.
194. Brandon, how do we begin our writers and readers workshop?
195. With five to ten minutes of quiet time.
196. So that we can what?
197. Sing.
198. OK, let’s get to work.
199. Then we move to a period of about forty minutes where we read and we write.
200. We gather in groups around tables and the children are writing about things of their own
choice.
201. It may be a letter, it may be a narrative, at the present time there’s a lot of folk-tale
 writing and retelling of familiar folk-tales going on in the classroom.
202. Often what the children choose to do is reflect the very topic that we are studying.
203. OK, would you read to me what you have got in your book so far?
204. Of course!
205. Thank you!
206. The gold rush?
207. Yeah, that’s my new chapter.
208. OK, fine, go to the part about the gold rush.
209. I've read the part about life-guards.
210. Chapter two: gold rush.
211. The gold rush was probably after world war two.
212. Why would you think that, can I ask you?
213. Well, I am guessing.
214. OK.
215. But, after world war two the gold rush began.
216. What does this say up here?
217. Clipper ship.
218. A clipper ship, cool.
219. Most of it would have canon but they don’t because they are pretty speedy.
220. Where did you learn that, about clipper ships?
221. Well, from books mainly.
222. OK, what does it say up there.
223. Act one: ships were sent out to carry the.
224. What’s happening here is that I am having a conference with Matt who has been writing,
all year long Matt wrote about transportation.
225. He had his own theme that he brought to the readers and writers workshop time.
226. So he wrote about trains, planes, cars, boats and everything and he explored those
things and he would go in to the library and get particular books to support his own theme.
227. OK, does that help you read it better now?
228. Yeah.
229. OK, so one million people.
230. I’m curious about this, how did you know to put that many zeroes?
231. Well, for one reason: Dan told me.
232. I am fascinated by that, that’s correct, that says one million.
233. Where did you get that from?
234. How did you know there were that number of zeroes in a million?
235. I read it from a book.
236. Here or at home?
237. At home.
238. That’s pretty amazing!
239. That says a million.
240. To carry approximately one million people.
241. I move around having conferences with the children and making anecdotal notes on a
little pad, on a clipboard about what I’m talking to the children about.
242. So that at this point I was trying to do the listening step, the research step.
243. This particular classroom had twenty four children in it.
244. There were anywhere from what you would call emerging readers, who were still
struggling to understand what it was about, and maybe having difficulty learning their
alphabet even in the middle of the year, to children whose reading skills were more
advanced, perhaps at second, third or fourth grade instructional levels.
245. So the library in the classroom had to be a place that had a wide range of literature and a
wide range of instructional levels in terms of the standard teaching books that were in the
room.
246. I do have a teaching assistant for four hours in the morning which has a huge impact.
247. I do know people who don't have teaching assistants, and they generally have parents, or
others who voluntarily help in the classroom, taking on specific instructional tasks in the
classroom.

12:10 PM AUTHORS & READERS CIRCLE

248. OK, author and reader circle, we are going to celebrate something we are proud of.
249. Who would like to start?
250. Matt, what did I do when we were just talking over there?
251. I challenged you to do what tomorrow morning?
252. Where are you going to go to find out something?
253. I am going to go to the library and find out when the gold rush started, after world war
two or before; but after world war two 
254. And then we get together at the end of that time and we have authors circle and readers
circle or occasionally what’s called author’s chair and reader’s chair where the children
share.
255. We might reflect on the piece that they have shared.
256. We might ask them a question or two about what they’ve shared.
257. And really that time is a time to celebrate.
258. It’s a time to come together and be proud of what we have done.
259. So that I often, when I ask the children to come to that group time that share circle, I ask
them to bring “if you are proud of something you’ve done today, please bring it to this
circle”, which really helps develop that intrinsic motivation.
260. Nice and loud, please.
261. They got home and knocked at the door.
262. Their mom came to the door.
263. How did you get home? – she said.
264. We walked on our feet.
265. She said: I know that!
266.
267. Can I read that page?
268. Also with kind of putting a lot of feeling into it.
269. That’s really clever, you have really made it your own.
270. It says: They got home and knocked at the door.
271. Their mom came to the door.
272. And, of course, in the Hansel and Gretel story, the mother would be very shocked to see
them at the end, right?
273. So she says: How did you get home? – she said.
274. We walked on our feet.
275. She said: I know that!
276. That’s really neat, you put in there
277. When people are talking that’s called dialogue.
278. Show the picture, she turned what?
279. She turned red.
280. Jason, would you share some of the thing you’ve been working on please?
281. I did the 'S'-es and my name.
282. You sure did.
283. Look at those S-es that Jason is working on!
284. Oh, man, that one, the second one on the left is really good
285. Did you lift your pen up for these?
286. Yes.
287. No.
288. No, these are good, but you didn’t lift your pen up for the others.
289. That’s a good job.
290. That’s great, Jason!

14:00 READ ALOUD

291. Don’t you dare bite Toto!

292. You are to be ashamed of yourself, a big beast like you, to bite a poor little dog.
293. I didn’t bite him. – said the lion.
294. I think that reading aloud to my children is probably the most important thing I can do
with them during the day.
295. I try to read aloud twice a day, once in the morning.
296. The book that I read in the morning is usually a book that is related somehow to the
theme that we're studying, so that right now a lot of what we’re doing is reading tales, folk-
tales and fairy-tales, and giving children a variety of experiences with those books.
297. Throughout the year we also explore a lot of genres, non-fiction, science books, social
 studies books, books that might be with a historical subject to biographies, all kinds of
different reasons.
298. I guess the goal is to develop in the children reasons to read and also to model good
reading, and for them to enjoy it.
299. And slap the lion right upon his nose, as hard as he could.
300. While she cried out 
301. I used term “we” when describing my classroom because I don’t see it as my classroom.
302. I see the classroom as “our classroom”, I see a lot of things influencing it.
303. I see it as a place where the learning is negotiated, where the children’s needs and
interests influence it, I influence it and the parents influence it.
304. So I see it as a balance of the things I am asked to teach, in the way I structure it, and
yet I believe wholeheartedly yet that children and their parents influence it a lot.
305. And for that reason I think that each year you try to develop a community of learners
that can work together, learn together, play together, cry together, laugh together.
306. And each year is different.
307. And so that “we” is a shared sense but it’s also something that changes year by year, the
“we” that takes place in the classroom.