FE #1

Observations

My teacher is so kind and thoughtful when she is speaking, and teaching. She has been teaching for around 20 years so she really knows what she is doing. I can tell that she took the time to get to know every student and learn what barriers they would have in the classroom. Her room doesn’t have a theme but it does have posters all around that relate to spelling and reading. She also has a word wall that is in alphabetical order that shows their sight words they need to know, ad they have been working on those since the beginning of the year. She has a timer going on the smart board to show the kids how much longer they have, and she usually has background music playing while they work at their desks.

Learning Experiences

On my second day, I got to take three kids out into the hallway individually and give them a sight word test.  A sight word test is where their sight words are in columns of two and they start off with the easy ones and it gets harder. It even goes all the way to the words they haven’t seen yet but will need to know by the end of the year. The kids sit there and read them off while I am copying down if they get it correct or if they say something incorrect and how they say it. It was interesting to see all the words that they had trouble with. After  I was done testing them I brought the last one in, my teacher and I looked at who missed what and she explained to me why those students missed those words. One of them was in reading intervention and was behind, and the other one had dyslexia. It was interesting to see how those educational barriers affected them.

Reflections

My teacher has a student in her class who has constant behavior problems. She stuck her tongue out at the art teacher,  she turned to the class after my teacher said something to her and said: “HOW DARE SHE??”. She behaves this way because she has been diagnosed with ADHD, and she is defiant because her mother doesn’t discipline her at the house. She is a perfect example as to how not only a learning disability but also problems at home can have a huge impact on a child’s learning.

Story to share

That same student I just talked about may have a lot of behavior issues but she does all that when I am not paying attention. The teacher gave her instructions and told her to finish up her snack and start writing because everyone had been done with snack for about 10 minutes now. She didn’t like that so she threw her pencil and missed and looked over at me to make sure I wasn’t matching and she notice I saw and came over to hug me and tell me “I’m the best” just so that I wouldn’t tell my teacher. She is very manipulative, and after I told my teacher she got sent to the office and pitched a fit.