Today, I spent the day in The Learning Academy in Ms. Swan's 4th grade classroom. The kids were all very excited because the teacher had just bought a fun memory game for the class which she said is very helpful in this kind of environment. She also said that normally giving students worksheets isn't a good thing to do, but in The Learning Academy it is helpful and important for the goals they want to achieve because using worksheets helps instill in the kids the basics that they need.
I noticed that while many of the boy students have the Diary Of A Whimpy Kid book on their desk or in their cubby most of the time, the girls have the Dork Diaries on their desks as well. It seems that the students are interested in reading books that are more easily understood because they are written from a child's perspective so to speak. This was just something I had caught on to which I thought was interesting.
During the day, Tia and I gave the entire classroom fluency tests for the teacher. I had the chance to give 5 students their fluency tests and what they did was read a page titled Mack Is A Pet Fox. They spent a minute seeing how far they could get in this one page story and while some students finished the page, others only got half way through the page. A lot of students had trouble with the name Mack. They kept saying the name Max instead and this was surprising because right now the class is working on -ck ending words in Orton Gillingham.
I have started to notice though that Jackson does better with spelling vocabulary words rather than reading comprehension. I have come to this conclusion because he did well on the Primary Spelling Inventory that I gave him, but out of the 3 times that he has been given a fluency test he was on the lower end of the class for reading a passage in a given time and comprehending.
Also, Ms. Swan took the time to tell us about these fantastic posters that each classroom in The Learning Academy have. The posters have pictures of hands and hand movements that the students can perform to determine what type of syllable the vowels and consonants are. This allows the children to become more fluent readers and able to decode words faster to improve their comprehension when reading and writing. I've seen these posters in the classroom before but nobody has ever explained them to me until now. I thought they were really interesting because not only were they colored and catch peoples attention, but it is also something very simple that you can do to improve the students comprehension in reading and writing and decoding skills with words that they get stuck on.