Assessment Questions

Shared Reading:

                At the beginning of the lesson the students gather around the carpet and read together as a class.  Mrs. Perez picks a poem with a lot of site words and rhyming words. I like the fact that she chose a poem about hot dogs, because she knows that this is something that her students are interested in. She reads with the class by using a pointer, so that all of her students can follow along with her. This helps the stronger and weaker students in the class. Since, a lot of her students are at different levels, this ensures her that even the students that read less fluently will be able to follow along with the class. Then from the shared reading she gets the students to a phonics lesson, she does not spoon feed the lesson to them, thus working on problem solving skills, she works on the short o sound, and teaches consonant blend. I really like the way she encourages and motivates her students even if they get stuck at times. She tells them I love how you’re trying, and not make them feel embarrassed. It is very important for children to feel comfortable in their environment.

Guided Reading:

                The teacher takes a group of children that in the beginning of the year were reading at a beginner level. The goal that Mrs. Perez has for this group is for them to develop fluency, expand their site word vocabulary, and their comprehension skills. She wants to verbalize the strategies that children use, because the more you verbalize the more they internalize, and the more other children can gain from each other. I thought it was a great technique that Mrs. Perez did when she covered the word from a sentence and she wanted the children to figure out what word belongs there based on context clues.

Differentiated Instruction:

                At this stage she divides the class in to learning centers. She has different activities to enforce the different skills the class is working on. Children that are on a higher level work on different reading and writing activities, for example she teaches them how rad higher level books and to take notes from it. She also has some students that still need some help so there are different activities that an assistant works with the student like making words. I feel that it is very important to have an assistant in the classroom so that both the assistant teacher and the teacher can help more students at one time. Mrs. Perez also has time to go around to the activities to see what the children know and what they still have to learn, and she also does informal assessments.

Assessment:

                Mrs. Perez assesses her students at the beginning of the year, in the middle of the year and at the end of the school year. This helps her know where each of her students are holding. Based on the assessments she implements different activities in the classroom so children could work on the skills that need to be strengthened.

                I feel that I gained a tremendous amount by watching Mrs. Perez, she really cares, loves and believes in each and every one of her students! She wants all her students by the end of the year, to know how to read no difference on what level they came into her class.