Teacher Observation Journal #3

Today, I went and saw my friends again or as I call them in the classroom "Mis Amigos". I was not in the classroom yesterday and they were all very happy to see me again. Well, because today is Friday it was "Game Day". The day started with the fabulous 5. Again, their grade levels are 1st to 5th. I played Guess Who and that was a great game to get the students familiar with question words which they have some trouble with (I will expand on that later). We also played with dinosaur models and I really LOVED that! The students were excited about the dinosaurs and wanted to hear all about them. Mrs. Becker and I read the facts about the dinosaurs. I find when the teacher is excited about something in the classroom it can be quite contagious! I absolutely love dinosaurs so I was reading everything I could about them. '

We also played animal bingo which is good for letter recognition.

After lunch the awesome kindergartners came into the classroom. They were very happy that it was game day. We played a matching game and one of the students did exceedingly well with it.

I had been thinking about questions that I wanted to ask the teacher and I got the chance to ask her at the end of the day. I asked her about needs assessment and how she keeps track of which students need improvement. She has such a variety in her classroom and I was curious how she figured out what they need. She told me it was through getting to know them and there was no formal process. I wonder how this works because as an onlooker I can see that going by memory would be difficult for me.

The next question I asked Mrs. Becker was why some of the students drop the final letter when they are reading. It has puzzled me for the last few days because I would listen as a student read and a whole letter would be dropped or a new one added. For example, the word 'will' is read as 'wilk' and 'continues' is read as 'continue'. Mrs. Becker explained that the students' parents and family are also learning English and are possibly less advanced than the students. The pronunciation is not as precise as it is in school. In other words today is the day I realized how important it is for teachers to ENUNCIATE!

I got some very wise words of advice from Mrs. Becker. I was telling her how much I just loved her students and she told me she felt the same way. She says her philosophy is to treat her students as if she were a mother to them (adults and children alike). She said the students are away from their families for more than 6 hours a day and need that in their lives. I remember that my most favorite teacher had this same philosophy.