Reflections on ED 100's visit to the Gilmour Academy Lower School

I really enjoyed our visit to the Gilmour Academy Lower School last week. The first impression I received was that it is a small, private school. It had a very warm atmosphere that was not intimidating or harsh in any way. The class sizes were much smaller than I expected though. I went to a private, Catholic grade school, and my class size was always about 45 to 50 kids per grade, about 25 per class.

The open air classrooms caught my attention. I had never really envisioned such an environment for a classroom, and I thought it was pretty interesting. I also noticed that in most the classrooms, the students were not tied to their seats during actual class time. They were freely moving about the room, but all the while still very attentive to the teacher and learning as well. This was also a new concept to me, because I never had such free reign during class time. The students were very well behaved during class and if the moving around got to noisy or interruptive, order was restored immediately when the teacher simply asked them to settle down a bit.

The students were also very involved in what they were doing in class. In the 4th grade humanities classroom, I observed the students preparing research papers on various topics. The papers were to be about four pages long. I figured that would warrant about 10 pages of research from online and books. These students however, had binders of information that to me looked like the research for a twenty page high school or university paper. It was pretty impressive. The amount of work the kids were doing and the level at which they were doing it was very impressive.

Overall, this visit strengthened my desire to continue in the field of education. I enjoyed spending time with the kids in the classroom, and observing the teachers in the various classrooms and subjects.