Primary

1. Primary Level
4th Grade
This is a group of 34 children about 11/12 years old. In Primary, according to
Piaget, the students are in a Concrete Operational stage during their cognitive
development. It means, that they could learn through the use of concrete material
or objects, with their time, space and quantity.
One of the main characteristics is: they can respond to meaning, this means that it
is not necessary that they understand a sentence word by word, here it is
important the information that they have around them, to focus on specific topics.
Also, they need to use their senses to touch and see, to interact with objects and
orally with their mates and teacher, to communicate and express themselves. In
this stage, the children need to feel they are special for teacher and their partners as
well. It is relevant that children in this age, enjoy working with material and topics
which are directly related to their own lives, giving to them the opportunity to
resort their background knowledge and share what they know. It is important to
take into account that they have a limit attention, so it is useful short activities to
make them feel involved and motivated. Also with that kind of activities, the
teacher can rest assured that the students do not get bored. During this period, I
worked with written short activities, and games or songs where the students had
to move around or competences.
However, here the teacher has an important role because they may be perceptive
and flexible to adapt their activities according to the students’ necessities. This is
one of the aspects I learned about throughout this period; in many cases, a lesson
which we consider nice does not result as expected, and we need to do some quick
adjustments at the moment of the class, to make students feel engaged and not get
bored.
All in all, I consider very usefully making students work in groups or pairs, not
only to make them work collaboratively but also to provide to shy students the
scaffold they need to participate and integrate them in the class. During this
period, I tried to mix all kinds of activities and resources to help students to
understand and learn in a successful way, not only to complete an activity or a
game. It was a great experience in spite of that they were a big group and they
were quite talkative, they enjoyed every class and they made me feel grateful
during every lesson.