April 21st

I was not able to make it to the classroom Friday for tutoring, and because of that I was planning on writing next week during the week that we could make up blogs we missed. I don't have anything to say about my placement since I have not seen them in three weeks. However, I have been working at my new job in Buffalo and that is a Language to Literacy program... I could talk a little about that.

We have started our second phase, in which we started a new book and a new vocabulary list. Although, before we started reading our story we did a cloze task assignment as a group and the children loved it. We had a letter typed out for their parents that had a few blanks that were the cloze tasks. One of the sentences for example was "This week we learned a lot of ____", with the answer being "rules". The kids really seemed to enjoy this and it reminded them of the vocabulary and rules learned the previous week.

I feel as though children really enjoy cloze tasks because they not only have context clues to work from but it shows them how much they know!

I think that in my tutoring placement now cloze tasks would be a really helpful task for some of the children on the lower end of the class, especially since they are ESL and a lot of the english language does not come naturally to them!

This Week/Closure

This week, I have been helping one of the ESL students in my classroom recognize English words in a simple picture book that correspond with each picture. I have been working on having him use the pictures cues to figure out the word that is written below the picture, in English. To do so, I ask him, "What is this?," then follow the question by, "In English." I speak to him in Spanish when I prompt him so that I can better relate to him and ensure he understands my requests. Sometimes he responds in Spanish because he cannot always remember what the word is in English. When this happens, I respond, "Si," and then I tell him the English word. I then say the word in Spanish, followed by in English, and I have him repeat after me so he can make the connection. I have been working on this book for about 4 days now and it seems that he is remembering his English words better than when we started, so that is a good sign he's improving!

Also, the iPads my students use in the classroom just recently got some new math apps downloaded onto them. My students and I have been exploring these apps the past two days. They seem to be a bit more difficult than what the students are used to because some questions asked on the new apps are word problems. My job here is to help students understand the vocabulary used within the word problems, as it can be very confusing for the students to understand. Some of the math is too advanced for my students, but on the other hand, there are a few students who have seemed to grasp what the questions ask of them.

Overall, I am very happy with the improvement of the students in the math and literacy areas, in which I have seen and helped them with. I am happy to have been a part of their learning experiences and I can't wait to do this again next semester!

Things learned

Being in the classroom makes you truly understand what teachers deal with. So many students here at Fredonia are going to school for education and a lot of them take it very seriously and really enjoy it, but I see a lot of other students not taking it very seriously and just sliding by. When I see those people I think, "Oh well teaching must be a breeze someday. All you must do is teach a cirriculum from a book." Well that thought was entirely wrong. From tutoring I have been able to see first-hand all of the hard work teachers do every minute of every hour of every day. They must always be critically thinking incase their plan backfires or the students are acting up.

Another thing that I am in the process of learning, which teachers seem to do very well, is explaining. I have watched my teacher find the best ways to explain how to do addition and subtraction, how to combine two sentences so that you don't plagerize, and much more. I have such trouble trying to explain things to students, but with my tutoring placement I have learned so many things that will be so helpful to me in my speech pathology career. I also gained a whole new aspect of respect for teachers!

I am very glad that I was able to be a part of something like this!

Brief Thoughts

With two weeks off of school, I feel like it has been forever since being in the classroom. I am so excited to go back on Monday; I cannot wait to see the students! I can only imagine how hyper and off-task the students will be after being away from the school atmosphere for so long. They are already a handful when they have a routine! Aside from being in this classroom daily, I am also placed in another school for an after school program twice a week, which I haven't been in because they have Spring Break as well. As nice as it has been to have more free time to get caught up on schoolwork and such, I still miss the school environment. I am still debating when my last week for tutoring should be, especially with the crazy amount of projects I have to do for finals. This reason has made it a much harder decision for me to choose when to end my tutoring time. I can't believe the semester is already coming to an end; I remember my first time entering my tutoring classroom! I am definitely going to miss the students, but I look forward to the many more experiences to come!

Aside from my placement...

My students are on spring break for the next two weeks and because of that I thought I would talk a little bit about my new job that also pertains to literacy! I hope that is acceptable! If not I will surely write another post. Anyways...

I was just recently hired at Buffalo Hearing and Speech as a clinic aide. I aid two speech pathologists in running the Language to Literacy program at a charter school in Buffalo. The children that we work with are children who need some touching up on their literacy skills. I thought that I would talk about this because I find it very neat how they go about teaching the children. I have only had one day of work so far so I don't have a lot to talk about, but it was definitely interesting!

I am not sure how much literacy these children lack because I was not around for any pre-assessments or when they chose which students got to be in the program -- but we began our first class discussing proper classroom rules, and also introduced the initial [p] sound as well as some vocabulary. We didn't go into depth about the [p] sound much, but their homework was to find five items around their house that started with 'p'. Although this seems simple, it allows the children the opportunity to not only think of the labels of objects but also how they are spelled. It is actually more cognitively complex than it seems! The introduction of vocabulary correlates with our class discussion of vocabulary, which is neat! The speech pathologist introduced approximatly seven new words and had each word on its one piece of paper along with a picture posted on the wall. She discussed these words in short and then we stepped away from them for awhile. Later on we started reading the story "Duck in the Truck" in which all of the new vocabulary words were found. When we came across some of the words she would ask students if they remembered the word or definition. These vocabulary words will stay posted on the wall and we will continue to add to the list while we read the story repeatedly for the next few days.

All of the things that we did in this program correlate to things that we have discussed in Reading First from phonics to comprehension, and I find it very interesting to see all of it being used first hand!

Sorry this was so long! (...and I hope it's acceptable for my weekly post!)

Friday Before Spring Break

Since the school district I am in currently has Spring break, I'll discuss the festivities that my students got to partake in on Friday. When I first arrived to the classroom, I helped the teacher aide hide little plastic eggs full of candy all around the gym. At first I thought it was a pointless idea because the gym is too empty to be hiding eggs in, but then the classroom aide and I moved the basketballs, kickballs, pinnies, and other gym supplies all around the gym floor and started hiding the eggs underneath those objects. It seemed like it would be way more fun to go on an "egg hunt" with this approach. When all the eggs were successfully hidden, I went back into the classroom to find that my cooperating teacher had drawn little noses and whiskers on every student so that they looked more like a bunny. They wore bunny ears that they made the previous day as well (in a headband form); it was the cutest thing. When we took the students to the gym, my cooperating teacher told the students that the "Easter Bunny" made a mess when he was hiding the eggs. Then, each student went on the "egg hunt" and had to find 3 eggs each. It was really fun to see how excited they were about this experience. I definitely thought it was a nice break from the week's work. Afterward, the entire school had community members come in and read to different classrooms. I thought this was really awesome that the school incorporated other people from the community right into the classrooms to positively portray reading. I happened to leave right before our assigned reader got to my classroom, but I would have loved to see how the children responded to whomever was reading to them.

Tutoring on March 27

This week in tutoring my first job was to assist two students who were having trouble combining the important things from a few sentences into one sentence with many facts so they wouldn't plagiarize. It was actually sort of difficult for me to do! We would have to combine 2-3 sentences but the sentences were already so short and to the point that it made it very difficult! And anyways, I didn't learn about plagiarism until years after second grade!

Either way - doing all of these activities with children is really helping me learn how to break something down and make it easier to understand for children. As a speech pathologist I am going to need that skill when working with children who need to learn how to make sounds correctly. Luckily, working with speech we have the resources such as our own production of sounds and the actual visualization of our mouth to assist these children. I find it slightly harder as a teacher because with teaching a lot of things that are being taught are abstract, there aren't many visuals to work with. Yes, there are visualizations such as pictures and things, but why do we spell 4 four and for without a 'u'? -- Because we just do! If that's not confusing to a 5-7 year old I don't know what is! Teaching takes such abstract ideas and teachers must find ways around the abstract-ness of it all to help children understand.

Before tutoring I always found myself to be very nervous and uneasy when it came to explaining things to children. I was always second guessing myself. Tutoring has taught me ways around that and has boosted my confidence in working with children and has taught me ways to better teach and explain certain things to children. :)