During my Guided Lead Teach experience I worked to further my own

development by planning activities that are hands on and interactive. So far this
year I have observed many literacy centers involving worksheets and cut and
paste activities that do not require students to interact with one another or learn
new vocabulary. This is something that intrigued me right from the start,
especially because literacy in Kindergarten is so important. At this point in the
year our main focus has been phonemic awareness to guide students as they
begin to read. We assess our students on their ability to recognize letter sounds
and to combine those sounds into words. The activities I have witnessed allow
students to gain familiarity with letters and their sounds, but they do not focus so
much on expanding their vocabulary or understanding. I believe high level
thinking, questioning, and hands on activities enrich emergent readers in a way
that worksheets and cut and paste activities cannot. My job as a teacher is to
select activities that reach the needs of diverse learners, help students gain
academic confidence, and promote social interactions.
All children have their own individual way of learning. In my classroom for
example, I know that I have auditory learners, visual learners, physical learners,
hands on learners, verbal learners, social learners, and learners who benefit from
unique teaching strategies. These preferences for learning domains vary
depending on the subject being taught, for example, one student may need
hands on experience during math time and auditory experience during literacy
time. The best way to reach these different learning styles is by providing
materials and instruction that can transfer across various domains. Samantha

Cleaver, a writer for Scholastic, states that, Hands-on projects obviously engage
kids who are tactile or kinesthetic learners, who need movement to learn best.
They also engage students who are auditory learners, who talk about what
they're doing, and visual learners, who have the opportunity to see what
everyone else is creating (Cleaver, 2014). During my Guided Lead Teaching
experience I focused on lightening the load of worksheets my students complete
on a day-to-day basis. While worksheets can be efficient for assessments and
practice, I was worried that our repetitive use of letter and number practice
sheets werent meeting the diverse learning needs of my students. This is
something that has grown to be very important to me; I experimented by trading
out those worksheets for hands on activities within our centers.
While implementing more hands on activities throughout my unit to reach
the needs of diverse learners, I noticed a shift in confidence level for a number of
my students. My mentor and I have been working on emphasizing our use of
positive reinforcement in the place of constantly redirecting students who need
support staying on task. Similarly, I have been trying to emphasize the positive
learning moves my students make across various domains. Some of my students
struggle with paper-pencil activities, and if those were the only options I provided
them for instruction they might not be successful. Students should be given the
opportunity to learn in ways that promote success catered to their learning styles
in order to boost their self-esteem.

When considering diverse learners completing worksheets vs. engaging in

hands on tasks, The Early Childhood News says, The successful children may
truly comprehend the task or may simply have guessed correctly. The less
successful ones often learn to think of themselves as failures, and ultimately may
give up on school and on themselves. These children may react to the stress
created by fear of giving the wrong answers by acting out their frustrations and
becoming behavior problems, or by withdrawing and becoming reclusive
(Grossman). By limiting the variety in activities across all subject domains
teachers are not allowing each and every student to reach their full learning
potential. If teachers rely on worksheets every day, the students who do not
benefit from paper-pencil tasks will lose their confidence and lose their motivation
to keep trying. Hands on activities give more opportunities to access the different
learning styles of each individual child.
I have learned in my classroom that one of the most engaging and multimodal ways to instruct literacy is through interactive literacy games with goals
relative to the students interests. By tapping into something that the students
care about or are interested in I was able to grab their attention and keep them
motivated to learn. During my Guided Lead Teach I had students go fishing for
letter sounds, feed monsters letters based on the sounds the monster was
hungry for, and plan imaginary trips to wherever they wished only bringing items
that begin with certain sounds. These activities gave students the opportunity to
engage socially with one another and explore within their learning.
NAEYC (2005) states that,

Letter games and sound activities have a place in content-rich literacy

instruction. Children learn about the alphabet and sing and play with rhythm
and rhymes. In an environment full of vivid displays of developmental
writing and functional print, children engage in learning how to write their
names and perfecting the sounds of language. But letters and sounds do
not take center stage. Rather, these skills serve a supporting role,
strategically placed to help children in their content explorations. Driven by
their curiosity and interest in communicating and interacting with others,
children learn about the uses of literacy in ways that have personal meaning
and value for them.
Not only do these interactive lessons provide social benefits for students,
they also seem to prove to parents that we are meeting the diverse needs of their
child. During our parent teacher conferences one of the families that came in to
speak with us mentioned their concern about the amount of worksheets their
child came home with each day. They had an image of their child sitting still for
the majority of the day completing paper-pencil tasks with limited social
interaction, which worried them. We assured them that this is not what their
childs day looks like in Kindergarten, however it got me thinking about what
percentage of the day my students spend sitting at their tables. I strongly believe
that the more they move around and interact with one another, the more they are
able to access multi-modal learning opportunities and fully engage in their
learning.

References
Cleaver, S. (2014). Hands-On Is Minds-On. Scholastic. Retrieved from
http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3751901
Grossman, S. The Worksheet Dilemma: Benefits of Play Based Curricula. Early
Childhood News. Retrieved from
http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/earlychildhood/article_view.aspx?
ArticleID=134
Neuman, S. B., & Roskos, K. (2005) Whatever Happened to
Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Literacy? NAEYC.
Retrieved from
http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200507/02Neuman.pdf