Field Visit #3

I did not feel very useful during this field visit because we were not able to help our teacher or students with anything. Most of the visit was spent observing the class during their literacy block in which the teacher had reading groups while other students read independently at their desks or used the computer. A parent came in to lead one reading group as well. I think it is great to see parents volunteering in the classroom. Not only does it provide a good example for the students, but also helps the teacher out a lot. One interesting thing I observed during this visit was a lesson on highlighting important words in questions. It did not take very long and it was obvious that the class had done this before. They went through a series of about five questions as a class and each student highlighted the important words in the questions as they went through them on their own papers. Then they went back and answered the questions. This must be part of the preparation for the SOLs. I found it interesting because usually we see teachers focused on content learning for the SOLs, but here I got to see a class practicing test taking strategies as well. Alison and I were also able to look at the students' science books in order to take notes and prepare for our unit.

When the block one science class came in, we gave them our preassessment for our unit since this is the class to which we will be teaching our unit. In some ways it is a little disappointing because although some of the students from our regular class are in this block one class, there are many other students from other third grade classes in block one as well so we do not know all of the students as well as we would like to. The preassessment went well though. All students were able to complete the assessment in about 10-15 minutes. Hopefully it will give us a good indication of where our students stand in regard to our unit.