Sunday, February 6, 2011
Techsteps
Throughout the past few weeks, I have been doing TechSteps with second and third graders at Valley Elementary. Since I had never had the opportunity to do lesson, I was a little unsure of what to expect from the students. I have heard most of the teachers at the school discuss how difficult the lessons were for each level, and I had also sat in a PLC about the teachers need for a technology specialist at the school to aid in completed the required TechSteps lessons. I co-taught with another intern during the lessons. While one of us gave the instruction, the other walked around the lab to assist students. I understand that the issue with a lot of the teachers and TechSteps are that the teachers have not had a lot of experience with the technologies included in the lessons. Luckily, since Amber and I had a lot of experiences with the technologies included in the lessons, we were able to teach and assist the students. Both grades did a great job during our lab sessions, and I think the classroom teachers learned some things too! I don't know my opinion on the effectiveness of TechSteps, but I think that having students use technology is a great idea. Some of the lessons are definitely beyond the students, and I don't think they necessarily target skills that second and third grade students should be working on.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
ESL classroom observation and lesson reflection
On January 11, I observed Ms. Nedeff, North's English as a Second Language Teacher, instruct students of all different ages, backgrounds, and of course, languages. Since my home PDS does not have very much diversity, I was amazed at the student differences. These students have come from all over the globe from places I had never even heard of.
During the first few classes, Ms. Nedeff had the students show me books they had written and were in the process of writing. She heads a program at North titled "Students as Authors," in which students write and illustrate their own stories. The stories get binded and the authors also translate them into their first language, whether it be Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, etc. Over 25% of the population at North speaks a language other than English, so Ms. Nedeff keeps very busy throughout her day.
While there, I assisted Ms. Nedeff and worked with some students one on one. I played a game with the second grade students in which they practiced vocabulary using picture cards and were "sentence detectives" to find the mistakes in a sentence. Ms. Nedeff created the game board herself and used it as a motivator to keep the students engaged. She had me keep score and used the score as a test grade. I liked the idea of this because the students had no idea they were being assessed, they were just having fun!
I also had the chance to observe/work with her first and fourth grade students. In first grade, I helped students get started on there story assignments, then helped them brainstorm sentences to write in their journals for that day. In fourth, the students were working on illustrations for a book they collaboratively wrote. Ms. Nedeff wanted the students to be very specific with their illustrations.
After observing the class for a day, Ms. Nedeff allowed me to plan my own lesson to do with the second grade students. I chose to do a lesson from the book, "Snowmen at Night" because of the snowy weather we had been having. To introduce the topic of the lesson, I planned to have the students "create" a snowman out of various shapes I previously cut out without telling them what the shapes created. At first, I only gave the students the scarf, nose, and arms of the snowman. While manipulating the shapes, they were making guesses such as "tree, bird, leaf, arm, hands." When I added one of the white circles, they guessed "moon." Then, one student put the white circle and the scarf together and said, "It's going to be a head and a scarf." As I began to add in the small black circles that formed the eyes, mouth, and buttons, one of the boys immediately yelled, "Snowman! It's going to be a snowman!"
After congratulating the students on figuring the figure out, I allowed them to glue all the pieces together to create the snowman and then told them we would come back to it after we read the story. Instead of just beginning the read aloud, I guided the students through a picture walk of the illustrations in the story. I allowed them to take turns interpreting each page and asked them to be very specific in their descriptions. The students did a wonderful job, and could use the correct vocabulary. When I actually read the text aloud to the students, they found it funny how similar the story was to their descriptions using simply the illustrations.
To assess the students comprehension of the reading, I turned the large snowman over and asked them to tell me about the story (e.g. how did it begin? end? what happened in the middle? characters? setting?) After discussing the story, I had the students create their own page in the book. I asked them to write at least one sentence and illustrate their sentence. I asked them to be sure that their picture goes along with the words in the sentence. Although we ran short on time, the students got pretty far on their pages, and I was very impressed with their creativity. I left these with Ms. Nedeff so the students could finish them up whenever they had extra class time.
I was very satisfied with how this lesson turned out. I especially enjoyed conducting the picture walk, because the students were able to tell their own version of the story, before actually reading it. I will definitely use this lesson and activity again, and plan on using picture walks more often when conducting read alouds. In my opinion, they really helped with the students' overall comprehension of all the different events that occurred.
During the first few classes, Ms. Nedeff had the students show me books they had written and were in the process of writing. She heads a program at North titled "Students as Authors," in which students write and illustrate their own stories. The stories get binded and the authors also translate them into their first language, whether it be Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, etc. Over 25% of the population at North speaks a language other than English, so Ms. Nedeff keeps very busy throughout her day.
While there, I assisted Ms. Nedeff and worked with some students one on one. I played a game with the second grade students in which they practiced vocabulary using picture cards and were "sentence detectives" to find the mistakes in a sentence. Ms. Nedeff created the game board herself and used it as a motivator to keep the students engaged. She had me keep score and used the score as a test grade. I liked the idea of this because the students had no idea they were being assessed, they were just having fun!
I also had the chance to observe/work with her first and fourth grade students. In first grade, I helped students get started on there story assignments, then helped them brainstorm sentences to write in their journals for that day. In fourth, the students were working on illustrations for a book they collaboratively wrote. Ms. Nedeff wanted the students to be very specific with their illustrations.
After observing the class for a day, Ms. Nedeff allowed me to plan my own lesson to do with the second grade students. I chose to do a lesson from the book, "Snowmen at Night" because of the snowy weather we had been having. To introduce the topic of the lesson, I planned to have the students "create" a snowman out of various shapes I previously cut out without telling them what the shapes created. At first, I only gave the students the scarf, nose, and arms of the snowman. While manipulating the shapes, they were making guesses such as "tree, bird, leaf, arm, hands." When I added one of the white circles, they guessed "moon." Then, one student put the white circle and the scarf together and said, "It's going to be a head and a scarf." As I began to add in the small black circles that formed the eyes, mouth, and buttons, one of the boys immediately yelled, "Snowman! It's going to be a snowman!"
After congratulating the students on figuring the figure out, I allowed them to glue all the pieces together to create the snowman and then told them we would come back to it after we read the story. Instead of just beginning the read aloud, I guided the students through a picture walk of the illustrations in the story. I allowed them to take turns interpreting each page and asked them to be very specific in their descriptions. The students did a wonderful job, and could use the correct vocabulary. When I actually read the text aloud to the students, they found it funny how similar the story was to their descriptions using simply the illustrations.
To assess the students comprehension of the reading, I turned the large snowman over and asked them to tell me about the story (e.g. how did it begin? end? what happened in the middle? characters? setting?) After discussing the story, I had the students create their own page in the book. I asked them to write at least one sentence and illustrate their sentence. I asked them to be sure that their picture goes along with the words in the sentence. Although we ran short on time, the students got pretty far on their pages, and I was very impressed with their creativity. I left these with Ms. Nedeff so the students could finish them up whenever they had extra class time.
I was very satisfied with how this lesson turned out. I especially enjoyed conducting the picture walk, because the students were able to tell their own version of the story, before actually reading it. I will definitely use this lesson and activity again, and plan on using picture walks more often when conducting read alouds. In my opinion, they really helped with the students' overall comprehension of all the different events that occurred.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)