Reflecting on My 5th Grade Field Placement Experience

Field Placement Summary and Reflection

Summary

This semester my field placement was in Ms. Stone’s 5th grade classroom at Thurmont Elementary School. There were about twenty- five students in the class. I was able to learn a lot through my field placement experience. Most of my observations occurred during their science lesson and then for a short period at beginning of writing. It was interesting to see how literacy was used in a subject that was not Language Arts. There were many literacy aspects integrated into the lessons that I observed. During my observations, I was able to see strategies used for writing, being engaged in the lesson, and ways to aid reading comprehension. During one of the writing lessons, the students were writing a persuasive piece on whether or not there should be more recess. The

Stone integrated digital text into the lesson. The students were all using Chrome Books. Use of the Chrome Books allowed the students to have access to digital literacy. The students were able to access a video and answer questions about it. They could also go through the website making the reading more interactive. When looking at digital literacy in the classroom, Hutchinson (2012) found that some students became too involved in the technology aspect of the time and did not focus enough on actually completing the task at hand. This could be seen in Ms. Stone’s classroom. The students were more engaged in their work when working on the Chrome Books thank when they were just writing on a piece of paper or reading out of a book. But, Ms. Stone said that the quality of the students work sometimes is not as good because they become more distracted when using technology. The Chrome books also provided a good source for the students to be able to easily look back and see what notes they had taken. They worked on the water cycle for multiple classes, so the students could easily go back and look at their previous