Small Groups: Week 8 at the Learning Academy

This week functioned differently than normal. Ms. Jameson had the room divided up into three different small group sections each led by either my partner, Ms. Jameson, or myself. Therefore, my observations and interpretations will be written to reflect the feel of the classroom.

Student (During morning assessments & before small groups)

​Running Record

• Asked to pick from two passages to read

• The Sea Park - ORF Progress Monitoring 9 from DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency Progress Monitoring Third Grade Scoring Booklet

• The Great Barrier Reef - Probe 4 from DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency Progress Monitoring Fourth Grade Scoring Booklet

• Picked the fourth grade reading level

• Read with 98% (97.6) accuracy

• This does not include self-corrections

• 347 words, 7 errors not self-corrected

• 2 of these were unknown words

• Under 3 minutes

• Commented on sea turtles by exclaiming, "My favorite!"

• Read with little expression - mostly kept voice flat and without inflection

• Ran a few sentences together without stopping for the period

Yopp-Singer Phonemic Awareness Test

• Ran ending phonemes together on one syllable words

• Voice pitched lower for this test

Small Group 1 - Daisy, Evan, and Wren (Board Game)

Board Game (This game centered around finding the main idea in a passage three to six sentences long and from multiple choice answers. It's played much like the game Monopoly in the idea that if you land on a certain space - the spaces with binoculars on them in this case - you drew a card, read the passage, and answered the question. If you got the answer right, you moved ahead one space. If you got it wrong, you stayed where you were. The first person to read the end won. I kept the answer sheet in front of me and monitored the game. Ms. Jameson also asked me to tell the students the words they didn't know rather than have them sound it out because this game centered on comprehension.)

• Daisy rolled the highest number and went first; Evan and Wren followed in consecutive order.

• Evan answered his first card incorrectly

• Read passage aloud

• Read answers silently

• After Evan, I asked them to read the whole card aloud

• Daisy and Wren read the passages quickly and accurately; Evan struggled with some cards, but got all his answers correct past the first

• Wren missed one question near the end

• Daisy got all correct

• Evan became visually agitated when he fell behind in the game and kept rolling the dice below a three

• Halfway through the game, Wren stood up out of her chair and remained standing for the rest of the game

• Wren and Evan both were unable to pronounce names of people on the cards

• Evan mistook the name "Claire" for "Carla" until Daisy corrected him

• Evan's attitude improved once he began rolling four and above

• Wren missed a question after becoming distracted.

• Daisy won the game.

Small Group 1 - Daisy, Evan, and Wren (OG Small Group)

OG Small Group - This small group required the students to listen to oral instructions given by me. I read out questions or prompts about the word patterns they had been learning so far from index cards created by Ms. Jameson. Some questions that has skills about going back and referring from previously answered questions stumped the students for a few minutes.

1. What suffixes mean "more than one?" -es, -s

2. What suffix means "happening now?" -ing

3. What suffix means "happened in the past?" -ed

4. In questions 1-3, which suffix only follows certain letters? -es

5. What letters does this suffix come after?

6. List all of the digraphs and one trigraph.

There were 10 questions in all. The final question required the students to pull words from a list and use them in a sentence. Before this question, we read through the list in an echo reading as the students repeated the words after I said them. If they were unclear with the meaning or pronunciation, they could ask me to repeat the word or tell them the meaning. We were allotted 17 minutes for this center.

• Wren figured out the answers were on the wall of the classroom.

• Daisy didn't refer to any resourse and got them all correct.

• Evan struggled with the answers, and didn't recongize the answers were on the wall.

• Wren had to make sure her handwriting looked good before she moved onto the next word. She would erase the word if it wasn't up to her standards.

• Daisy covered up her answers.

• Daisy asked if the digraphs and trigraph had to be written in order. I replied with the negative.

Small Group 2 - Johnny, Lance, and Hector (OG Small Group)

OG Small Group - This small group required the students to listen to oral instructions given by me. I read out questions or prompts about the word patterns they had been learning so far from index cards created by Ms. Jameson. Some questions that has skills about going back and referring from previously answered questions stumped the students for a few minutes.

1. What suffixes mean "more than one?" -es, -s

2. What suffix means "happening now?" -ing

3. What suffix means "happened in the past?" -ed

4. In questions 1-3, which suffix only follows certain letters? -es

5. What letters does this suffix come after?

6. List all of the digraphs and one trigraph.

We were allotted 6 minutes for this center. I was only able to get through questions 1-6 with these students.

• Johnny easily found the answers on the wall beside him.

• The other two students erased their answers many times.

• All three students asked me to repeat the questions several times.

• Hector asked if the digraphs and trigraph had to be written in order. I replied with the negative.

• These students, except for Johnny, didn't understand that the first question could have more than one answer.

Interpretation

This week was something new for all the adults in the classroom. Ms. Jameson mentioned that she isn't good with small groups because she likes being able to oversee the whole class. However, she tried the lessons with us today and it went great! I know the students had a lot of fun with the board game because they were excited for their turns. They always wanted to get a binocular card and read the passages! I believe that the students I oversaw had a good grasp on the concept of main idea during the game. Evan had some trouble when reading the cards and didn't know how to pronounce the names of the characters in the passages. I noticed Wren had trouble with this, too. I believe this to be that that names to do not typically follow a spelling pattern. These students are taught to decode words with the spelling patterns, but the names often proved an issue. The second center was a lot less fun than the first and posed a lot more problems. The students didn't understand that the first question could have two answers, which tells me they really didn't catch the meaning behind those two suffixes. They correctly answered questions 2 and 3, but became completely lost on question 4. This required students to pull from their answers in 1-3, but it proved to be a lot more difficult when students didn't write the correct answers. Since I couldn't tell them what to fix, I had to just tell them the question in a different form/structure. This helped enought that the students could discern what they needed to do.

I found that Johnny was relying heavily on the answers on the wall. Ms. Jameson didn't cover them up, so the students could find them if they let their eyes wander for a few seconds. Johnny immediately locked in on the answers and wrote them down. His writing was legible and easy to read when I could catch a glimpse of it. For his morning assessments, Johnny has shown that his reading level is at a 4th grade accuracy. However, his expression needs a lot of improvement. He reads with a flat voice and focuses more on getting the words right than reading them with the appropriate tone. He scored a 98% on the Running Record for accuracy and he reads with a good rate (a little under 3 minutes for the passage today), but I would not rate him that high for expression. I will be working with him on 11/4/15 with a one-on-one Reader's Theatre to develop his fluency. In the following weeks, I will also help him with his spelling patterns and phonemic awareness. He knows how to spell words correctly and how to break their sounds apart. However, he runs his rimes together and I want him to slow down his enunciation. For his spelling, this will mainly be reviewing the spelling patterns he has already learned and helping him with long vowels, other vowels, and mainly inflected endings. Johnny has shown me that once he learns a topic, he can do it well. He doesn't have any learning disability (diagnosed), but need to work on his confidence in his skills. I believe that working with me on his activities in the morning and me giving him specific praise and feedback will build his confidence up.

#week8 #LA2 #DRI