Reading and Writing Lessons

During my tuesday experience I have been fortunate to see alot of reading lessons conducted by my teacher. I feel that my teacher has a good system when it comes to reading and writing in the classroom, Below I am going to talk about what my teacher does over an entire week with reading and writing.

When my teacher delivers a reading lesson she plans not only for one day, but for a week. She explained to methe process of her reading plans over the week and how she sets it up. On Mondays, she introduces a new story in the students reading books, she also accesses their prior knowledge when introducing the story, and she goes over words identification, which is also important vocabulary that is in the story, which students need to know. On Tuesdays the students start their literacy centers. There are four literacy centers and the students have a specific time each day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to work on these centers. During that time, the teacher also does Guided Reading Groups, which she has four of. Since While watching this being done, I connected a lot to what I have read in our Language Arts Book. Connections I saw and made were the accessing background knowledge of the students, which is very important. The teacher prompted the students by asking them questions, taking out the map, and showing them and asking them where countries are and where the states are, in relation to the setting of the book. The students enjoyed sharing their stories or what they know about the west, where the story took place. They also know about matadors which were a big part of the story. Students even were allowed to get up and show the class what a matador is and what it does, which is a good way to model and have the students get involved. Once the students did prep work, and the teacher taught, they did a story map and filled in the eight boxes of important events that happened in the story on a worksheet. When the students finished, they met the teacher on the rug and they went over their story maps and the teacher wrote the correct sequence of the story map on a big poster board worksheet that they had. She involved the students and chose different students to share an event on their story map, if they didn’t have the events in the correct sequence or even the correct events, they were prompted to erase and fix their papers. This showed students what the important events really are, and how to sequence them in a correct order. They had the opportunity to fix their paper and re-sequence the events if they made a couple of errors, if they think their paper was correct and looked appropriate to hand in, then they could hand it in.

For the writing lessons that I have observed I have notcied that my teacher does a lot of mini lessons focused on writer’s workshop. Before the students began writing, she had them join her on the rug to talk about what "good writers" do. During that time, students raised their hands and said what they thought good writers do. The teacher made a list on poster paper which she was going to hang up in the classroom for the students to be reminded of what they should do when writing. She talked about reading their story's aloud to themselves or a partner, which would allow them to catch their own mistakes, they need to think about if their story has a beginning, middle, and an end, and what goes into those sections. IWhile observing this i rremember about reading this and talking about it in class. I remember when we watched that video last week the teacher in that video did this as well. It seems to be a good practice. Once the students discussed this and knew what they should do that day during writer’s workshop, they began to do their work.