When reviewing educational videos, I decided to look at kindergarten videos. Since this was my first year teaching videos, I could still use lots and lots of ideas. I looked at several mostly good ones before I came across one that blew my mind. It was called
Kindergarten Power Teaching Expanded! and the URL is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygIwC3PSvkIt was awesome. In the video, a teacher by the name of Andrea
Shcindler uses her students to demonstrate amazing techniques called power teaching. She first demonstrates their "rules" routine by asking a student to come up and lead the class in their rules. They all recite the classroom rules together. As they recite the 5 classroom rules together, the rules are also placed in text at the bottom of the screen. The class then counts together how many stars,
smilies and
saddies they have. At the
bottom of the screen it is explained that these are for the class to work together for end of week awards. The teacher then discusses how everyone must participate to get this award, and then she has them to tell them selves to participate and then tell their neighbor to participate. I loved this part where they told their neighbor to participate and am
definitely going to use this technique. I do something similar, but not as often as in power teaching.
Throughout the video you can see that the students have practice the recitations so many times that it is second nature to them. The teacher uses phrases constantly to guide the students. She says things like this as the class repeats her: bodies up, a bubble in your mouth (meaning quiet), walk walk walk, hands and eyes, etc. The children loved it. I also noticed some variations she used to the same
houghton-
mifflin reading series we use at our school that I would like to use, but the purpose of the video was to demonstrate classroom management techniques, and that was what impressed me most.
I thought the video was very well created, and the text at the bottom of the screen was a good way for Andrea to let you know what was going on...things that you might not understand like what she means when she says "a bubble in your mouth" etc.
I am
definately going to look more into this classroom management program, and try to incorporate it into my classroom at least to some degree. I do think I have heard of power teaching before, but was not familiar with it at all.........so I was
truely amazed and anxious to learn more.
For my bad educational video, the worse one I watched was just a simple kindergarten sight word video. The person who created the video did not use any sound other than her reading the words as they appeared. She did not use any graphics. She could have possibly added some graphics to the slides, and used different colors for each word or something since it was geared toward little children. But I thought the worse thing was that she really didn't leave time for the child to try to figure out the word before she said it, and it moved too quickly through the words to be a useful tool to use in kindergarten. I did stumble on another sight word video that was a little better. The guy who did it used bubble words with what looked like florescent blue around the outside of the letters, and he gave plenty of time before each word so that the child could say the word before he said it out loud. But his actually did not end up being sight words........it was just three letter words like fat, fig, and bat which was good too, but I wouldn't have called that a sight words video....... that would be a beginning words video, or phonics word building etc.
All in all this was a great assignment because in looking for a good kindergarten video I found lots of them. I found videos with songs I could use in my class, although I have lots of them I really like some of the ones I found and want to try using them. I also found lots of new activities to use..........and I am just starting. I'm going to go back and keep searching for ideas in
the future. I didn't realize
YouTube would be such a great resource for teaching kindergarten. Yeah!!!!
the future. I didn't realize 
