Interaction: Week 6 at the Learning Academy

Observations of the Classroom (8:00-9:30)

• Read Naturally

• Students "Read Naturally" in the morning on their iPads

• Read story in three segments

• Read to: sentences become highlighted when being read

• Learn vocab during this segment by clicking on words the student does not know

• Read to: student must follow along on their own

• Answer questions about the story aftewards

• Read Naturally by themselves

• Review the story with the teacher

• While waiting to review the story with the classroom teacher, the students may do activities involving synonyms. However, as I observed one student, he was purely guessing at them because he either had no idea what the word was or what the synonyms listed were.

• Students write name on the board after they complete all steps of Read Naturally

• OG Practice

• Ms. Jameson had the students review all the sounds/syllable types they had learned so far (short and long vowels, digraphs, syllable types, and blends)

• The class was to recite the sounds without using the guiding motions or hints on syllable types and short vowels

• Students at first still worked with motions

• It took them three tries to say the full phrase correctly for syllable types

• New sounds

• Allowed to write on the desks for start of lesson

• Must enuciate the procedure, not run the steps together to sound "sing-song"

• Ms. Jameson had the students repeat the procedure twice to sound strong and clear

• Working on Music House Word Families (ing, ang, ung, and ong) and trigraphs

• (short) /e/, /i/, /a/, /u/

• /ch/, /y/, /x/, /qu/, /sh/, /ck/

• (suffixes) -ing and -s

• -tch, -ong, -ung, -ing

• Moving onto Boat House (ink, ank, unk, and onk) in the next day or so

Observations of Teacher

Once the students have written their name on the board for finishing "Read Naturally," Ms. Jameson will call the students over to review their story with her.

• She goes through a few steps with them.

• They read the story, she guides

• The student answers questions about the story

• Models going back into the text to look for answers

• They review vocab and new words together

• One student didn't know the vocab, so the teacher explained to her that the student needs to be proactive and tap on the word when she doesn't know it.

• Student didn't know the word "abdomen."

• Ms. Jameson showed her how to review the word.

• Doesn't allow students to slack off

• Immediately corrects incorrect behavior during OG procedures

• Signs agendas and checks homework during specials time

• Confers with students that she believes need extra assistance

Observations of Student

• Running Record (2nd grade level DIBELS text)

• Johnny read along with his finger

• Replaced "to plan" with "planned"

• Replaced "the" with "my" in "The favorite place for my family..."

• Replaced "a" with "the" in "We can watch a movie anytime we want."

• Self-corrected when omitted "it" in a sentence

• Self-corrected when combined two sentences

• Original: On special nights Mom and Dad let me rent two movies. Dad makes the popcorn...

• Combined: On special nights Mom and Dad let me rent two movies and make the popcorn...

• Repeated words/sentences when self-correcting

• Total words: 230

• Missed: 6

• Words correct: 224

• Read in: 2 minutes and 30 seconds

• Handwriting

• Johnny repeats the instructions and echoes them

• Cannot stay in the lines yet

• Forgets to cross "t's"

• Forgot to write the "t" in heated, and wasn't able to see the error when prompted

• Lesson by Partner (Introduction to Blends Within a Text)

• Johnny focused on my partner when she was teaching

• When given practice, he immediately put his pencil down and didn't attempt to try it

• My partner assisted him for most of the individual practice, but he didn't understand the concept.

Interpretation

My interpretation of all this is that Johnny has trouble understanding new concepts right away. My teacher mentioned that he has a possible processing issue with written text. This could be why he had trouble seeing the blends or understanding how to separate them from words. He gave up almost instantly and didn't respond to my partner's help at all. He looked dejected (he sat slouched in his chair and wouldn't look at my partner) and was very quiet. Johnny has shown immense improvement in his skills during this experience, but he struggles with new concepts until they "click" with him. In his handwriting, I noticed that he forgot to cross his "t" in almost every word, and I believe this is because he focuses so much on writing the word in one go in cursive that he forgets he wrote a "t" by the time he gets to the end of the word. His running records are proving to me that he reads above a second grade level and needs more challenging texts to do assessments with. However, I would like to work on expression with him because he often reads his texts in a flat voice as he tries to say each word correctly. My teacher mentioned that Johnny tested low in Phonemic Awareness when he first came to the Learning Academy, but I see that his ability to break apart words and put them back together has improved. I plan to do another phonemic awareness assessment (much like the Yopp-Singer one done in Week 1) to measure his progress from the beginning of the semester.

#week6