Being Observed

Observation

On Tuesday I had my first observation by my field supervisor.  I wasn’t freaking out with nerves, but I was definitely a little bit nervous going into the day.  The thing that had me the most uptight was the fact that my field supervisor would be the first guest we had in the classroom all year, so I was unsure about how distracting it could be for some students.  I also did not inform my students about our guest until the morning of my observation, they were all very excited to find out a college professor would be coming into their classroom.  When I walked the students to gym that morning, the field supervisor was actually at the door, waiting to be let in to observe a fellow student teacher before coming to my class.  Students instantly began asking if that was our special guest.  I’m just glad they had 40 minutes of gym to work off some of their over excitement. 

The lesson I was teaching during the observation was on using context clues while reading. I started the lesson with this sentence on the board as the students walked into class from gym:

I allowed them some time to think about what the word meant on their own, and then I opened it up for a class discussion.  I began the discussion by asking them the different strategies they could use to figure out what a difficult word in their text might mean.  The first few suggestions were a dictionary, a thesaurus, ask somebody; but then a girl said you could use the words around it and what you already know from the reading to help you. It was awesome to hear a student say that, without even knowing what context clues were beforehand. After a couple more strategy suggestions the students shared what they thought context clues might mean based on how it was used in our modeling sentence.  Once I felt that they had the idea of context clues down we moved on to the next task.  I introduced my field supervisor with her title of “Doctor” and asked them to tell me what “Doctor” might mean based on context clues, since she isn’t a medical doctor.  They did a very nice job with using context clues to work through what the general definition of the word “doctor” means. (Side note: At the end one girl went up to her and said “if you were a real doctor you could help me with my headache”).  I think using our lesson as a way to introduce our guest helped make the students a little more comfortable having a stranger in the room.  We then went on to do a couple practice problems together.  We wrapped up the activity by having some read to self time with a sticky note.  The sticky note was to be used for more context clues practice.  I asked the students to write down a word in their book that they did not understand and to use context clues to define it.  At the end of read to self time the students were able to share their word, the passage it came from, and what they thought it meant.  My hope is the extra practice during read to self time will help the students remember to use context clues on their own in order to better understand whatever it is they are reading. 

Overall the observation ended up going really well, and I think my students did a very nice job staying on task and not getting distracted by a guest being in the room. 

INDEPENDENT Writing

This week in writing we started working on another watermelon seed story. The students were to write this story about a favorite place, or they had the option to write about a place they imagined on their own. I think it is important to give the students some freedom in their writing because I want them to enjoy their writing time, and I want them to write for the whole time. When they choose the topic it allows them the opportunity to pick something they know well, thus helping them write for the couple days of writer’s workshop we use for each writing assignment. 

During writers workshop I have noticed that many students frequently ask me to read their paper, or do not get started until I give them ideas on how to write about their topic. We want our class to be able to write independently because every one of the students is capable of doing so. To try to increase their independent writing stamina I told them my mentor teacher and I would not be answering questions, giving tips, reading papers, or talking in any way for the first fifteen minutes they were writing. Before they started I made sure to take the time to answer any question a student had about the assignment, but once they started I just walked around and observed the class. Many of them were able to do some quick brainstorming and get right into their watermelon seed story. For some it took a little longer, but with my mentor and I being adamant about not talking for the first 15 minutes the students were able to get started all on their own.  I am very excited to read these watermelon seed stories for a handful of reasons.  The first being the fact that reading my students’ writing helps me continue to get to know them even better.  With much of this assignment being focused on independent writing, it will also allow for me to see where each student is at in terms of writing ability and getting their ideas down on paper.  Along with the challenge of writing independently I asked the students to continue focusing on showing sentences and not telling sentences.  To help stress this idea they were given a second challenge for this story.  They are not supposed to say what the place is until the very last sentence, instead they need to show their audience the place through descriptive sentences, and then reveal the actual place at the end.  I really hope the additional mystery of their stories helped motivate them to work hard on showing the reader rather than just telling.