On Handling Assessment

When I was in elementary school I didn't give a whole lot of thought to how we were being tested,but from the front of the classroom I have realized that there is a lot of thought that goes into each test.
  I helped give a my first test in Mrs. Brown's kindergarten classroom just this week.  I called over each student one at a time and tested them on their ability to recognize the alphabet letters.  One on one testing was certainly the most effective method for testing kindergartners. A full class test would have been difficult for kindergartners due to their inability to read.  It might be interesting to try a group test to teach the appropriate behavior for test taking.
In Mrs. Heaps class I have helped give a math test.  My responsibility was to walk around the classroom to ensure that the children weren't peaking at their neighbor's paper and to ensure that they answered each question.  It was apparent that the students were still learning the test taking procedure, but it was interesting to see the tremendous amount of progress they made in a year.

English in the Classroom

In the two classroom I visit, only a hand-full of the students (about 3 or 4 to be more exact) are learning English as a second language. Mrs. Brown (the kindergarten teacher) speaks Spanish and I have noticed that it seems to help. Mrs. Brown does not use Spanish often, mainly she uses it to communicate with the parents who come in.  She also used it once while we were working in centers, I was trying to communicate the task at hand to a little boy, he just didn't seem to understand what I was saying.  Mrs. Brown spoke over my shoulder in Spanish and he seemed to understand.
During these early years in childhood language acquisition is at its peak.  Therefore, it is important that educators are constantly immersing the with all sorts of language to strengthen the child's understanding.  It has been amazing for me to see how well a given student can speak English in comparison with the non-English speaking parent.  At this early age, I believe that children pick up the language primarily through being constantly surrounded by it.  Teachers can also aid in the language acquisition process. I also think that a list of weekly vocabulary words (primarily for the first grade classroom and older), could greatly aid a classroom that is linguistically diverse.  Not only would this help ESL students learn more words more quickly, it would also help the native English students understand the origin and meaning of a given word.  I think that the Content Cognitive Dictionary could be a great strategy for teaching those new words.