Student Observations Day 6

Today was a good day in the classroom. Ms. Swan started the day off by telling us a small trick that you should try to use when you are first teaching. She said that when you are trying to assess how many students are finished with something you should ask, "Who isn't done yet?" or "How many students don't...?" this way if a lot of the students are done with the assignment there isn't a lot of hands raised at once making things more confusing. You can assess how much more time is needed on the assignment in relation to the amount of students still working. Even though it is a simple hint, I thought it was helpful and funny so I'm excited to use that in my own classroom. I can even use it over the summer when I'm working with my campers.

Tia and I both taught the class a fluency lesson that each of us created on our own. The class responded very well to both of our lessons and it was a very rewarding feeling. I really liked how Tia started off her lesson so model for the students good fluency. She read the book Room on the Broom by Julia Dondaldson and asked the students to raise their hand when she wasn't reading fluently. Tia then went on to read the book and changed her rate, expression and accuracy at different times to model for the students what was correct and what wasn't. I thought that this was a good way to engage the students but without them getting to rowdy or interrupting the lesson. Afterwards she asked the students to tell her examplse of how she read with poor fluency. Then they read a passage and had to focus on long and short pauses within the text. This is where Tia pointed out how important punctuation is and being able to correctly decipher it in order to read fluently.

For my lesson plan, I introduced the components of fluency with their definitions and modeled for the students how they effect fluency. Then I had the class do a Smartboard activity to show that they understood what I was saying and to test their memories. After this, I read a passage to the class about Skunks. I made sure to model good fluency for them and then after I was done, I had the class choral and echo read with me. By having the students listen to how the passage is supposed to be read and then reading it together as a class to ensure they know the correct rate the passage is supposed to be read with, expressing the correct amount of emotion and punctuation and accuratly saying all of the words. Afterwards, the students worked with a partner and read to each other. The more practice that these students receive, the better. This way they now get the chance to try improving their fluency on their own. Then once they were done with that, I had the students go through and circle/underline the parts of the families in words that the class has been working on. Ex. -ck endings, -ing endings, -unk endings, etc. The class has been learning those and a couple of others explicitly so I felt it would benefit them to incorporate this as best as I could. Then as a special treat for listening and participating so well, I let the students create a drawing or story of their own with just the words that they circled. I felt it went well overall and it left me feeling confident and ensured me that this is what I am meant to be doing with my life after college.

Our lesson plans took up most of the regular class time that we were there so we had just enough time to perform the running records on all 3 of our students. I enjoyed working with Max and Jackson because they seemed eager and actually had improved reading on their DIBELS assessments. I really believe that it was because of the lessons that Tia and I taught the class but it was nice to see that they were improving. They still have a lot to go on in order to have exceptional fluency and good reading comphrension but the running record gives us the data we need to start working towards that. The rest of the students had snack time while we were testing our students. I have noticed that Jackson is very shy but he seems more comfortable with me than he did at the beginning of the semester. I plan on giving him a running record assessment next week on Diary of a Whimpy Kid to show him that I paid attentino to what he likes.

#fluencylesson #rate #accuracy #expression