Last week we were not in the classroom because the college had fall break. So after a week off, we finally ended up back in The Learning Academy! The morning started off slow but after the students started to focus, the pace picked up. When the students arrived they were very talkative and weren’t putting their backpacks away and sitting in their seats in a timely manner. Once Ms. Swan told the students what the morning work was, they started their journals.
Today was the first day that I had actually seen Ms. Swan be stern with the students. They were very loud and noisy at the beginning of the day and she told them that if they didn’t start behaving like they should be, she was going to start taking away Dojo points. At one point during the day, we actually saw her take away a Dojo point for the first time. Ms. Swan is usually very lenient with the students so they tend to talk a lot during transitions and Ms. Swan was not going to take any of that today. She told the students that if they didn’t start listening today, especially after what a rough day they had the day before, she was going to get the wicked witch broom out. She then asked the class to behave and follow procedures because they had been practicing them for some time now and she knew that they could behave. After she had this discussion with the class they finally started to behave and do their work. I think this was well needed because the start of the day and each lesson is always so slow due to fooling around and talking. The class could get so much more done if they were better focused all of the time. It also seemed like Ms. Swan was in a bad mood because she kept snapping at little things with the students but once they started to listen to her, she got much better and went back to being her happy self again.
I really liked how focused the class was today though because also for the first time I had seen a student actually ask the teacher a question about an academic assignment and not the teachers personal life. It shows at times that the teacher really cares about her students and are close with them because they talk about everything, but I wish Ms. Swan would focus on the lesson more so the students can learn the most that they can. They are already so far behind in their learning due to their difficulty with reading that I feel that they shouldn’t be distracted as much. The students had been in the classroom since 8:00 and by 8:45 only two students were done with their morning work. This shows that the students don’t focus well and Ms. Swan needs to start getting the students on task sooner in the day.
Ms. Swan explicitly modeled for the students what she wanted from them and I thought that this was something simple but important to do. The class then moved onto OG once they finally started behaving around 8:45 and practiced their letters and tracing them on the table. The entire class seemed to struggle with longer words that they practiced saying together. At one point I heard a student ask Ms. Swan if they could make a song with all of the words that they use and she said no. This is the second time that I have heard Ms. Swan tell the students no to making a song and I wish Ms. Swan would allow the students to do activities that activate their higher order thinking skills.
The teacher did set up a very cute Halloween book section in the classroom and decorated the room with pumpkins and witches and other things. I thought this display was really cute so I decided it take a picture of it for the future when I’m in my own classroom. At one point Ms. Swan gave the students a formative assessment to measure how well they are doing but she kept correcting the students’ answers and giving the students the correct answers. I felt that this was then an unreliable assessment and by the teacher helping the students get the correct answers made the assessment not valid. During the assessment, the students were supposed to spell the word plane. One student asked which plane they were supposed to spell, plain or plane, and Ms. Swan told them that they’ve only learned how to spell the word plane. She then told the students not to worry about learning how to spell the other version of plain. This didn’t sit well with me because teachers are meant to teach everything that they can to their students. A student should never wait to learn how to spell a word or know the difference between homophones. I wish Ms. Swan would have taken the time to teach the difference between the words to the students rather than push their desire to learn away.
Jackson kept resting his head on his hand and arm during the OG lesson. When they were tracing the letters on the desk, he had his sweatshirt covering his fingers the entire time making it difficult for him to accurately trace the letters. The students were using a new piece of paper with very thin lines and Jackson continued to write incorrectly on it. He had to be asked a couple of times to write his answers down on the review paper and he had to be reminded to write them in cursive. Ms. Swan was getting frustrated because Jackson wasn’t putting the effort in. He also kept resting his head on his desk when he should have been paying attention. When I gave Jackson his running record, he read 51 words in 1:00 minute. I noticed in this running record that Jackson kept changing simple words within the text. The words he would change would be me to him or is to was. The sentence still made sense when he changed these words he would just start to rush ahead and then mix up sight words. He also changed the word similar to smaller. It took Jackson a total of 5 minutes and 6 seconds to read 254 words. The numbers continue to go up each week and it shows me that he is improving in reading comprehension.
