Field Blog Post 2: BMS

Beachwood Middle School

 

 

On Thursday, February 2014, my education class went to Beachwood Middle School and observed the classrooms and the learning environment. To give a little background on this school, BMS is located in a commercially thriving part of the mini suburbs outside the Cleveland area, which means they are provided with a good amount of grants and funding. Not only that, but the school has a very diverse school with various amounts of culture. In this middle school, since they very financially stable, they provide every student a laptop to borrow for the school year. This school is very different from my middle school when I attended years ago. My school wasn't like Beachwood because of how more integrative they were with technology, the opportunity to learn a different language, etc. My school was very boring in comparison to Beachwood. Here are some of the observations I noticed in my time at Beachwood.

 

5th grade Art class:

• Jazz music in the background, which made the class more calm and helped sooth the mind of the students.
• the teacher was very interactive with students, when they needed help or some kind of inspiration on how to make the art they were making.
• positive comment all around from the teacher to the students
• there were big tables with multiple students at each, which helped the students socialize and help each other on their art.
• the walls of the classroom were filled with the students artwork and accomplishments; this shoed great appreciation for the students creativeness

 

5th and 6th grade Spanish class:

• very colorful; lots of posters of the Spanish speaking world
• the whole class was very interactive, the teacher would have the whole class dance and sing to songs designated to words and grammar they were learning at the time, which made it fun for the kids.
• the teacher was very eccentric and made the class very fun because she had a great personality and knowledge of Spanish to the point where she made it fun to learn Spanish.

 

Overall, my visit to Beachwood Middle School was a successful one. I learned how the learning environment differed from elementary school to middle school. Beachwood is a good school that is very diverse with vey interactive classes that make learning fun and interesting, but still challenges the students to think and solve problems. I could see myself doing more observations here in the future.