Field Visit #2

My second field visit to my classroom was even better than the first one. I began this visit by just observing like last time. I watched as the teacher read aloud to the students from Bud, Not Buddy. It was interesting to see how the students responded differently to the book. Some sat intensely focused on the book while others sitting in the back seemed to get distracted by other thoughts once in awhile. They all seemed to enjoy the experience though and peels of laughter could be heard from the whole group in unison at certain points throughout the reading. I made me feel good to see that they were having such a good time and that read alouds can still be as entertaining to children as video games and television. I was also interested to see how the teacher interacted with the students during the read aloud. She stopped to ask them questions sometimes, but not so much that the reading was disfluent. The questions were of various natures including clarifying, summarizing, predicting, and reacting. She also stopped at one point because one student wanted to share a personal story that connected to the book. The teacher let the student tell his whole story, but was then quickly able to refocus the class on the book so that other students did not start wanting to share their own stories as well. I thought it was nice that she allowed this student to share and was not so overly concerned with time and getting a certain amount of reading finished that she had to ignore the student.

During this field visit, I also got to work on word study with two girls in the class. I really enjoyed this because it gave me a chance to interact with two students on a more personal level. They were working on making words plural with es, s, and ies endings. They cut out their list of words and made categories with them. Then I helped them to join some of their categories together and to understand why certain words were grouped together because of the way they are spelled when they are made plural. This helped them to understand the different plural endings. Then they practiced spelling some of the words before I gave them a "test" on all of their words. They used white boards and erasers to write their words. After they had spelled a word, I asked them why they spelled it the way they did. This allowed them to process the different rules in greater depth. I also gave them one word from each category to spell that was not on their word list to see if they could apply what they had learned to new words. They did very well with this task. I was impressed to see how engaged the two girls were with the words. They enjoyed cutting out their words and putting them into categories. They were also eager to spell all of their words for me to prove that they could do it. I was happy to see the amount of effort they put forth during this task. It seemed more like a fun activity and less like work to them.