Student Observations Day 11

The day started off like any other day in The Learning Academy. The students completed their morning work and today there was actually a tift between two students in the morning. One student was upset that another student was going through their stuff on their desk. What I didn't like about this was that Ms. Swan handled the situation in front of all of the other students. She didn't take the two students aside and raised her voice so then the rest of the students stopped what they were doing and was looking at the students getting in trouble. This is not how I would have handled, I would have pulled the two students aside to prevent from embarrassing them in an unnecessary way.

Ms. Swan asked Tia and I to grade papers today. The papers that I graded today were about VC.CV words. These are also known as vowel consonant consonant vowel words. Some examples of these words were napkin and selfish. The students were practicing determining where the words would be split up. All of the students got a hundred on this paper. Tia graded a paper called How to Lose Weight and it was an article on space. I checked Jackson’s paper and he had gotten 6 out of 15 questions wrong on the packet. 3 of the questions were asking the definitions of words used in the article, 2 questions were sequencing questions and 1 question was about information from the text. The last time I graded a science paper that Jackson completed, he had trouble with the sequencing problems as well. This shows me that Jackson could use some extra help with sequencing.

It was a half day due to teacher development but the morning seemed to be very slow and drag on. The students practiced phonograms like the always do and traced the letters on their desks. Then they started learning about the suffixes -s and -ed. During the entire lesson Ms. Swan continued to ask the students why each suffix made the word sound a certain way and had the class using higher order thinking. They were evaluating the sounds and how each letter affected the ending of words. The students used green, blue and white papers with certain suffixes on them. The teacher would give them a word and each student would pick a piece of paper with the suffix that they felt when on the end of the word. I thought that this was a cute idea because the kids were able to draw a picture on the piece of paper that related to an example of the suffix and a word.

Afterwards the students had snack and then had the chance to dance to the dancepuppydance song again on gonoodle.com. I hear about a lot of teachers using this website as a reward for their students and plan on looking into it and possibly using it when I have my own classroom. I worked with a student on a reading assessment and helped her practice skills to increase her reading comprehension. It seemed to go really well and she learned that it is important to go back and reread the questions when you are done answering all of them.

I also worked with Jackson today. He had broken his collarbone when playing football with his older brother and is now learning to write with the other hand. It's a bit of a struggle but he is managing. After seeing the improvement last week with Max and how a cold and hot read can have an effect on a student, I decided to do the same with Jackson as well. The first time that he did the cold read, Jackson read 46 words per minute. He struggled with the words Asia and live. After we read through the passage together and I helped him through the words that he struggled with, Jackson read the passage again. He read 61 words per minute in the hot read. He had problems with the word Asia again and since. Jackson's fluency has definitley increased since I first started working with him. His rate and expression has increased and now we just need to work on his accuracy. His confidence was also increased and I think it's making a difference.

Ms. Swan changed the section where all of the holiday books are to Thanksgiving themed and I thought it was very cute and a good thing to have in the classroom

#Thanksgiving #hotread #coldread #gonoodlecom #VCCV