My name is Cristina Spathis. Welcome to the comment section of my weekly observation blog! I am observing a second Grade ESL student who's first language is Spanish. Her parents are from Mexico and she has a twin brother who is also in the program. Only spanish is spoken at home. For our book project we are using "To the Beach" by Thomas Doherty as our inspiration. My student is going to write a book titled "To the Library". Read this section to learn more about my weekly progress!
About me
I am a Childhood Education Graduate currently taking EDLI 636 at NYIT, Old Westbury. I will be student teaching in the Fall of 2010 and look forward to having my own classroom one day. I too entered the school system as an ESL student. I can definitely imagine what these students experience is like and hope they develop the confidence that I eventually did.
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The school I was placed needs to find an ELL student for me to follow as I was placed in a mainstream class intially. I will follow up again Monday. Upon entry of my first day I will show the packet of information. I think I would suggest that this be approved ahead of time for next round of students or prepared a semester ahead so they can dive into the observation.
ReplyDeleteI have been informed that the forms have been signed we just need to use a pseudonym for the student.
ReplyDeleteI have the signed forms. The project was approved by all parties.
ReplyDeleteMy student was having problems with identifying consonants today and the changes that a suffix has in the pronunciation of a word like bath vs. bathing.
ReplyDeleteOn St. Patrick's Day, I went to my observation and we started the day as usual. It was Shelly's turn to ask the students the weather, date. After they greet the teacher and perform the language objective: To listen to a poem, read a poem and write their own poem. It was glued into their poetry folder. The aim was to identify who is speaking in the poem, and where is the boy getting ready to go?
ReplyDeleteWe continued with our book project where I reread teh book without stopping. We also set up a graphic organizer for next session.
On Fri 3/26 we used inspiration to create the graphic organizer to visually capture the ideas that will be used in her book. This will be used for each concept in the book. The student really enjoys the opportunity to use technology and she is really good at, showing confidence and concentration. During group tasks she is sometimes easily distracted and sometimes diruptive asking random questions. This keeps her on task. She is excited to work on her book project.
ReplyDeleteI find she has difficulty concentrating but I also feel it's becuase she is so quite in class that she is so pleased to be in a comfortable environment and wants to talk and express herself.
On 4/21 & 4/22 my student and her classmates observed Earth Day. There were a lot of activities using picture prompts to drive out vocabulary words that surround Earth Day. A story was read and they followed up with a sheet of words and sentecnes that they had to color, cut and put together as sentences in which flowed in a story about earth day. My particular student is picky when it comes to coloring and was taking a lot of time to complete the project. When she has the pictures and words she grasps the ideas and concepts well. When it is implicit and you ask her to think and come up with her own answer, she struggles and doesn't know where to search in her prior knowledge. I believe part of her problem with this is pratice. She has no one to practice these skills with and practice her vocabulary out of context. I believe this will hinder her ability to move out of ESL as she can read a word list and story on grade level.
ReplyDeleteOn 4/21 & 4/22 my student and her classmates observed Earth Day. There were a lot of activities using picture prompts to drive out vocabulary words that surround Earth Day. A story was read and they followed up with a sheet of words and sentences that they had to color, cut and put together as sentences in which flowed in a story about earth day. My particular student is picky when it comes to coloring and was taking a lot of time to complete the project. When she has the pictures and words she grasps the ideas and concepts well. When it is implicit and you ask her to think and come up with her own answer, she struggles and doesn't know where to search in her prior knowledge. I believe part of her problem with this is pratice. She has no one to practice these skills with and practice her vocabulary out of context. I believe this will hinder her ability to move out of ESL as she can read a word list and story on grade level.
ReplyDeleteFor the book project we highlighted the text from our draft in which we want to finalize on good paper. The student began designing her title page. She had never used a highlighter before and found it very helpful.