Podcast Reflection Paper

This podcast was an interview between Leanna Prater and Vicki Davis for Davis’s Podcast “Every Classroom Matters”. Leanna Prater is a classroom teacher with an M.A. in education who uses play in her classroom to excite students about learning. Prater helps her students explore topics by using manipulatives and things that they are familiar with. She also likes to give them opportunities to explore online. Two main items she discusses using in her classroom to help her students explore ideas and learn in this way are Legos, and a computer program called Scratch. Scratch is a computer programming website that allows users to program their own interactive games, stories, and animations. Prater explains that both Legos and Scratch can be used to teach all different ages and subjects in a fun way. She first gives an example of how she has used Scratch in her classroom to evaluate her student’s learning on their caves unit.

She then gives an example of how she used manipulatives in her professional development classroom with other teachers. Prater had her adult students build a model out of Legos to give a physical representation of what STEM meant to them. The professional development students then could use this model to help them explain their thoughts and allowed them to use a continual thinking process about what STEM meant to them. These teaching techniques can be used by all age levels and for all subjects. The intended audience of Vicki Davis’s podcast “Every Classroom Matters” is educators and parents with students. The ideas presented about using play in learning are very easy to implement. They are easy to implement because all the teacher needs are access to material that their students can play with in their hands, and