Observing and Interacting With Professionals/Colleagues in Your Setting- Literacy

After observing Ms. Thompson's Kindergarten classroom. She has 18 students in her class that are very busy and loving to learn to read and write. Ms. Thompson has Incorporated into her classroom reading and writing throughout the classroom. Each center was labeled with additional information to let you know where you were at and paper and writing material was also in each center. There was the housekeeping, reading center with headphones, art, and the testing center where children go one at a time to be tested if they miss a test or random reading and math test. The room is labeled with the alphabets, numbers, shapes,calendar, and the weather chart. The children learn to read silent letters and write upper and lower case letters. The children have spelling test weekly with challenge words. For example, the challenge words would be yellow, purple and orange. They also learn multiple meaning words like sink and may.The lesson plans that Ms. Thompson use are what all the Kindergarten teachers use. There are a total of four Kindergarten teachers. They get together weekly to go over and plan together the lesson plan for all the Kindergarten classes. Looking at the lesson plans and observing in the classroom, Ms. Thompson starts with one subject like art and quick  to into another subject (reading). This is what all of their lesson plans consist of starting with one lesson and leading right into another.
What was very noticeable was no parent involvement in the classroom. But homework was given as a packet on Mondays and turned it on Fridays. Ms. Thompson did tell me that parents are asked to read to and with their children nightly. There are incentives such as free tickets to Great America over the summer tot he students who read and  record what and how often they read at home. This was a good idea to get parents involved.
The insights that was visible right away was Ms.Thompson was quick to correct the students if they said a word or sentence wrong in a polite way. As to teach the students the right way of speaking to each other and understanding what they are saying. Also, children were quick to read and write down what they had read in their journals that were neatly stacked in the writing center and labeled with each child's name on it.
The challenges will come with being new at teaching and interacting with a classroom of children trying to keep their attention and making learning fun for this particular age group (5 and 6 year old).