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Jennifer Doering
Katie Rasmussen
Realities of Teaching
14 October 2014
Kindergarteners Love Finger-paint!: Making Lessons Appropriate for Students Abilities
Last week, I had the pleasure of observing a lesson in a kindergarten class. They were
learning about the differences and connections between primary and secondary colors. Since they
were kindergarteners, the teacher needed to make the lesson accessible to young students. She
did this in many ways, which can be split into two groups: making the subject matter
comprehensible to students and supporting students with developmentally appropriate practices.
These two groups correspond to two Teaching Performance Expectations (TPEs), 1A and 6.
To make the subject matter comprehensible to her students, the teacher used activities
that would interest and excite kindergarten age students. She began her lesson by reading a story
about colors. It was a basic story with information about the three primary colors, red, yellow,
and blue, and how they combine together in different mixtures to create the many secondary
colors of the color world. The teacher then told students that they would be pretending to be
(quiet) scientists and would perform an experiment about mixing colors. She told her students
that they were going to think like scientists and she didnt know what the outcome of the
experiment was going to be. This introduced a piece of the scientific method, that experiments
are necessary to determine how the world around us works, without describing the scientific
method itself. She was able to incorporate it in a way that kindergarteners could understand.
The experiment that they performed involved finger-painting and was very fun for the students.
In all, the lesson was perfectly suited to kindergarteners.

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Throughout her kindergarten-appropriate lesson, the teacher also integrated
developmentally-appropriate practices for kindergarteners. While she read the story about colors,
she asked her students to follow along and identify words and colors that they recognized. She
also encouraged them to read along with her, allowing them to feel that they were more
connected with the lesson and practice their reading skills. With words that they didnt know,
such the word vermillion, she told them to watch her mouth as she said the word, then asked
them to say it with her. This practice of learning how your mouth is supposed to move and look
while saying a word is incredibly important for language acquisition. I recently watched a TED
talk from linguist Dr. Conor Quinn about the easiest way to learn new languages. He explained
that it is much more important to know how your mouth is supposed to move to create sound
than to know what the sound itself is supposed to sound like (listen and repeat after me). For
kindergarteners just learning new vocabulary, this watch my mouth idea is incredibly
important. In addition, the teacher wrote the three primary colors up on a board, between the
story and the experiment, and asked her students to help her spell the three colors. She had them
practice making the sounds associated with each letter as they did so. This allowed them to
practice language and spelling. There was a hand motion associated with each sound and there
were hand motions associated with many sayings and actions throughout the lesson. This helped
the students to stay engaged. The teacher did a wonderful job engaging her students and using
practices that were developmentally appropriate for kindergarteners.
I learned quite a bit during this lesson study: it is incredibly important to make subject
matter accessible to your students and to keep them engaged. Although all of the tips and tricks I
saw in this teachers classroom apply only to kindergarteners, the ideas behind them can be
used in any, and every, classroom.