Alideschenes's Blog

Week #3

The D.A.R.E officer came in this week and started talking about the paper that the children have to write in order to graduate from D.A.R.E. I observed his class three times because he stays in one classsroom therefore the children had no math class on Monday. In every class I noticed that more than one child in each class asked “what is going to happen if we don’t do it” and/or “what do I get for doing this?” It just showed that the children are more concerned with why they have to do something or what they will get from it rather than what they will actually learn and gain from it.

This week I got to go into an ESL classroom and observe four students, 2 Hispanics and 2 Asians. The children for forty five minutes sat at a table and read from a science textbook. They went around a table and each child had to read a paragraph. They discussed vocabulary words and other everyday words they might not truly understand. I saw an example of the Multidimensional Fluency Scale one child was at stage one in all three dimensions, she read very soft, in a monotone voice, very slow and with many hesitations. I also could tell that ESL is a very important part of this school because the teacher had an entire very large classroom!

I feel like I am limited on the things I can post to this blog because I am in a Math classroom all day; is there anything I can do to make this better because I hardly see reading instruction?