My interest as represented by the following 10 artifacts has been to develop special activity areas that complement and reinforce learning and development that occurs around normal classroom contexts and routines, by providing peripheral tools, techniques and activity areas that children can utilize in addition to their typical academic work. All ten areas have been explicitly developed and have proven useful, such that taken together they help to construct an effective environment for acquisition of new skills, knowledge and interests by first grade students in the world around them. Children of this age are largely still narcissistic and ego-centric in their world view, except that they do not have well developed ego-boundaries and diffuse, global and eidectic patterns of response that confuse self with the environment are typical at this age. At this age also is a very rapid period of growth that accompanies the acquisition of basic but true literacy skills, accompanied by cognitive integration of personality upon basic levels of adaptation that permit these kids a modicum of independent functioning in a larger world framework.

Use of these special activity areas, designed especially for this age level, has proven efficacious and successful in further facilitating and promoting personality and cognitive development of most if not all of the students in the class. Still, these ten sets of artifacts do not exhaust the range of special activity areas that have been provided for these students, and special mention should be made of the use of computers, libraries, the front carpet area where many shared activities are performed, and the front black-board area including the mathematics bulletin board with the number chart.

Mention should also be made of special activity areas that are temporally designed, rather than spatially configured, especially around aural-oral activities such as singing, story acting and skits, nursery rhyme and poetry reading activities, which the children especially enjoy, and the specially designed word-wall and sight word computer program that the children watch and read from the class television. It is especially in the organization and adaptation of symbolic framing techniques along a temporal dimension, and their integration into larger curriculum and management frameworks, that the value of these techniques is at their greatest in terms of the educational and personality/social development of children, especially those who can be considered at risk due to cultural deprivation or cross-cultural transition.

Great lip-service is paid to the value of developing context in relation to class-room activities that children undertake, but such areas remain relatively undeveloped and under-exploited compared to other areas of educational interest and involvement. Part of the dilemma of the development of context is learning how and why to achieve this form of development in a manner that is coordinate with advanced theory and methodology relating to human development. Children, who are at their most plastic in terms of potential growth and acquisition, spend the better part of their youth confined to desks in typical classroom contexts. It makes great sense therefore to broaden these contexts through such specially designed activity areas in order to realize greater gain per unit resource in their education.

The area above is located along one back wall of the class room near the teacher's group reading/assessment desk, and consists of two low plastic shelves that the children can independently access in order to play with and use the materials available to them, at their own choosing. I have found that this is an important component of the classroom environment and has played a critical role in making this classroom a successful, effective educational environment for the students. The games are leveled and most students find them stimulating to work with. The children take charge of this area and are responsible for keeping it clean and organized. The children have not yet failed in meeting this responsibility, as they value this area of the classroom very highly. My only suggestion is that this area is not as well developed or organized as it might otherwise be. It could have three sets of shelves, instead of two, and more activities can be added to the area that would be of interest to the students.

I have created a curiosity table in the classroom in which I am observing because I have felt like the classroom, being dedicated almost completely to language-arts, was lacking in basic contextual realia and informational exhibits/tools that tie to a larger world context, particularly a natural one. This area is really a kind of multi-purpose place in which there are a lot of things that may be of interest to the student. Students are finding increasing access to the table and things attached to the area as they explore possibilities.

Mr. Duck is a small yellow stuffed toy animal. Evidence of the personification of experience with animals in a non-threatening manner and with eidectic, relatively global or undifferentiated response of children of this age, especially kids with a strong Hispanic background, make Mr. Duck an especially effective device to facilitate the transference of the child's effective response in a manner that is construed as warm and secure for the student. Everyday, a new student gets to keep Mr. Duck at their desk, and sometimes even to take him home over-night. Stuffed animals were used effectively even with adults in China, and this device serves to enhance the environment and the strong sense of the child's ego within it.

I have collected over the years a range of language teaching tools to assist our primary efforts in Language instruction, and these are organized into working sets to help to reinforce a working and effective context, especially for remedial learners of English. These sets are regularly employed in a range of different ways to reinforce instruction.

File case with student files provides a useful organizational tool for managing and easily tracking the work of individual students and coordination of tasks and projects that students undertake. Accessibility of files for a class of 20-30 kids that easily fits into such a convenient carrying case is central to the success of such a system. A checklist or spreadsheet inventory attached to the lid of the box permits an easy to read checklist for managing the different things that the students do at different times.

We made a set of offices for students to set up at their desks to cut-down on the amount of peripheral distraction, especially for those students who are easily distracted and find concentration on tasks, especially for an extended duration, difficult at best. These offices have also proved extremely useful in small group testing and guided practice sessions, permitting the flexibility to set up alternative arrangements that allows the teacher greater control over the testing environment and the overall situation. These are management tools that are invaluable in any kind of classroom at any level.

Development of the mind must be made coordinate with physical development and the development of special physical skills such as throwing, catching, jumping, rope turning, etc., that build gross and fine motor skills together, as well as basic social skills in team activities. These tools extend the range and scope of the classroom to a much larger playground and arena, and they have been much enjoyed by the students.

A set of white boards, consisting of large ones, smaller ones enough for each student, and special ones with calendars and grids, permit the students to do a very broad range of activities involving writing, spelling, grammar, mathematics, quick drawing. I see them as excellent graphic organizing devices that improve and promote brain-storming and shared activities with students. They have an impromptu and modular capacity that is unmatched by any other piece of equipment in the classroom, with the proviso that there are enough white-board markers to go around and they are not dried up.

I have adapted a variety of different kinds of psychological and behavioral tasks from my own fieldwork in Anthropology and they have proven quite effective in "opening" kids up to the wider learning processes that go on around them in the classroom and stimulating development that may otherwise remain latent in children. Such symbolic framing tasks are coordinate theoretically and methodologically with the central constructs of human cognition and personality development and have proven of almost unlimited productivity and adaptability.

Our "everything" store has proven very effective and popular with the kids, and it provides them a hands-on context to deploy some of their newly acquired math skills in counting coins in denominations of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Students are allowed to earn more money by writing stories and drawing pictures with stories, as well as by helping out with teacher-assigned tasks during inbetween times in the classroom. Efforts have been made to control the amount of money the students have access to, as well as to make sure all the students have the same amount of money, overall, as well as the same level of access to the store. Students social skills and confidence in transacting independent have also been developed in this process.