Classroom Setting

     At first sight of my first grade classroom, I would consider it developmentally appropriate because of the physical arrangement of the room.  During the 2 hours that I observed on Wednesday, the class was mostly doing whole group activities on a large carpet in the front of the room.  This carpet was actually a large map of the United States, which I thought was pretty neat because it incorporates learning about geography even while they are only sitting on it working on other activities.  The class has a smart board which they use to do a lot of their literacy activities.  Their desks are set up in groups of 4-5 students in each group, which supports group work and is developmentally appropriate for 1st graders because students need their own personal work space (individual desks) but also this age also still benefits from working in small groups.  There was also a computer station that included 4 computers off to the side of one classroom where students would constantly be going to when it was their turn to work on the classroom's computer learning program.  These computers were still in the classroom, but they were off the one wall so computer activity did not disrupt the rest of the class. 
     The classroom's theme was "under the sea", so the teacher had many decorations around the room of things that related to the ocean and underwater life, which even included a small "swimming pool" in the reading corner.  I thought this encouraged student learning, because classrooms need to have a theme and many decorations to make it an exciting and comfortable environment for students to come into and learn.  There was also a wall of student work of an assignment that the entire class had just worked on, which is important because students need to see their work displayed around the room.  The only thing that I found I would change is that the teacher had the entire schedule for the day written on the white board, but it was written on the write board that was off to the side of the room and next to the door.  I would change the location of the schedule to the very front of the room, because the students should be able to see the schedule easily so they know what they will be doing that day in class.