How did the group benchmark assignment relate to your observation assignment? The benchmark assignment was really beneficial as I went into the classroom because I was able to see those things in action and notice what the teacher was doing that was good at this specific age group. It helped me to pay attention to things that were beneficial and things that might need to be altered a little bit to be more conducive to the kindergarteners.
How did the BYU Preschool or Kindergarten observation help you write the PowerPoint? I loved doing the observation because it gave me ideas of things we could do to implement the benchmarks and Utah state learning objectives in the classroom. It helped me to notice what would be good to use and things that would be better for a different age group. My observation experience gave me insight into the responses that children would give to different activities and to the teacher.
How can you implement the information gained from all assignments in your future classroom--even if you don’t choose to work with preschool or kindergarten-age children? Something that I think is a really good activity is having children have buddies from a different grades. So no matter which grade teach, I can make note of the benchmarks and have buddies in different grades and implement those to make sure they get the best experience possible. In general, it is important to take the benchmarks and apply them to the presentations of the curriculum, so they can learn in the most conducive manner to them.
What would you have done differently in this group PowerPoint project if it were an individual assignment? I feel like I would have tried to find a little more outside resources to implement and teach the importance of the different benchmarks in the domains—maybe by finding videos or examples that people could visualize. I feel like our group did well though, and each person pulled their weight as we created the presentation. I had my portion done really early, so I would have tried to get it completed sooner than we did as a whole.
Would you implement the presenting group’s in-home/classroom activity? Why or why not?
There were definitely some suggestions that they presented that I would implement in the classroom and at home. I really liked the Preschool idea to do a weekly observation of a tree or plant outside to see how it changes throughout the year. I feel like that is a good way to bring parents and students together to reach the goal of the teacher and the state objectives. I was impressed with the other things they suggested and how they thought outside the box in order to implement the benchmarks. In the kindergarten presentation, I really liked the example of asking a question and having the children pat their hands to a specific beat. That works with multiple domains: cognitive and physical.

GROUP EVALUATIONS: Using a scale from 1-10 (see chart below for point descriptions) record how well you believe the individuals in your group did in the following six categories.