Today in The Learning Academy was a slow day. Tia and I didn't do much with the students, but neither did Ms. Swan for the time that we were there. It was a very slow day for everyone involved. Ms. Swan was having problems with the Smartboard so we couldn't do anything that had been planned on there until the board was fixed. Tia and I helped Ms. Swan grade some papers of the students' work. I graded a paper called On The Moon and the passage was informational. It focused on the race to getting man on the moon and then other excursions after that. This paper seemed like something the class would use for a science lesson. I did notice that as I was grading the papers, Jackson had not completed a paper to be graded.
After we graded papers, Tia and I played Orton Gillingham bingo with the students while the Smartboard was still being fixed. The bingo consisted of Tia and I giving the students a phrase or a word and they had to find the answer on their board. There were a variety of boards that we were using so each student was focusing on something different. Ex: beginning blends, short e and i vowels, short o and u vowels, blends beginning and end. Then after a student had gotten bingo, the students practiced tracing the letters on their desk to continue OG practice.
After the class was done with OG, they all had snack so Tia and I pulled Jackson and Max back to perform our running records. We ran out of time at the end of the class so we were not able to give Max his running record. Jackson was excited for this running record though because today I had him read a passage from The Diary of a Whimpy Kid: Cabin Fever. This time when reading the passage, Jackson read 54 words in one minute and it took him 4 and 1/2 minutes to read a total of 150 words. I did notice though that he stopped reading all together when one of his classmates came up behind him and was watching him. This showed me that Jackson does get very self conscious when it comes to reading so I asked the student to leave so Jackson could finish reading the passage.
After snack time was over, Ms. Swan read the book Poppy by Avi to the class. Max was doing a book report on the book so he wanted to listen to the teacher reading the story instead of reading for Tia and I. We didn't want to prevent him from doing well on his report or have him not focused when he was reading for us so we let him listen. I really liked how Ms. Swan read the book to the class. She was very expressive and read with great fluency so she was modeling that for the students the entire time. I also liked how she asked questions along the way about what was going on in the book and what the students felt were going to happen next. Ms. Swan wanted to leave them hanging on a suspensful note so she asked them what they thought the title of the next chapter meant but ended up reading the entire chapter to them anyway. While Ms. Swan was reading the book I thought it was very professional when she changed the word idiots to people so she wasn't condoning name calling and bad behavior. Not only was it professional, it was also cute because she cares about her students.