When Sophia and I first walked in to Greenvale Park Elementary school we were surprised by the cleanliness and fresh white paint on the walls. We walked through various grade level’s wings before heading up the stairs to the fourth grade wing. Mrs. McLaughlin’s class is at the end of the hall, and as we approached, we saw the lights were out. Unsure what to do we waited patiently for something to happen. Finally catching Mrs. McLaughlin’s young and enthusiastic eye, she came out to greet us and explain the suspense podcast, entitled Six Minutes, the class listens to post-lunch and pre-afternoon work. This is one example of a post-pandemic activity that Mrs. McLaughlin does to help keep the kids engaged throughout the forgotten lengthy and taxing school day.

As we entered the classroom, the podcast had just ended and there were various sounds of surprise and excitement coming from the eighteen fourth graders in the class. When the lights came back on we noticed how female the class is, with only four boys located in one corner of  the classroom. The class is also missing two students who are still in quarantine, as 4 others had just returned to the classroom from also being in quarantine. This is another example of the various  impacts Covid has had on the class. The students and teachers are also required to wear masks, which varies in consistency among the students.

Our fourth graders at age nine and ten fall into Piaget’s concrete operational stage. During this stage children are learning to think more logically and flexibly: solving concrete problems and working to understand decentration, conservation, classification, and reversibility. The classroom definitely seems to promote these types of skills. For example, the kids were learning about the differences in various types of non-fiction books. The task was to determine if a book the teacher held up was narrative or expository based on the facts they just learned about each. Mrs. McLaughlin did the first couple with them and then alternated between the two, creating a pattern. However, as the activity progressed the pattern disappeared and the kids had to rely on their classification and reversibility skills to guess correctly which varied throughout the class.

The class then transitioned to reading, which started with Mrs. McLaughlin reading from a book about earthquakes. One of the girls in the class raised her hand after the introduction on “What are earthquakes?” and asked if Hurricane Katrina was an earthquake. Mrs. McLaughlin replied, stating “Well, good question, however, Hurricane Katrina, was a hurricane which is a different kind of natural disaster.” The girl remarked, “Oh, was it a flood then?”. To which Mrs. McLaughlin again replied, “Floods often occur during a hurricane, but a hurricane also implies harsh winds and lots of rain which creates the flood.” This is a good example of Piaget’s transitivity and reversibility concepts, showing that the student was attempting to relate something she knew to a new concept. However, she didn’t quite fully understand the differences between the concepts.

Another example of Piaget in our fourth grade classroom, was during the student’s individual reading time where they get to pick a book and read on their own for about 20 minutes. Sophia and I walked around and had students read aloud to us. I was with one boy who was reading a book about Squids and Whales. While reading he approached a word that he hadn’t seen before and worked in his head to figure it out. The word was “cephalopod”, which he ended up pronouncing a little incorrectly. But, using his Piagetian skill of decentration, he was able to formulate a full word instead of just a few letters.