Jackson Heights- Assessment

I was pleased to see that one of the jobs that the ESE facilitators do at Jackson Heights is make sure students are comfortable and have the services they need for assessment. Whether this may mean pulling students into a quiet place, reading the test to the students, or modifying their tests based on their disability, the teachers go out of their way to support the students. I have loved watching teachers model this to me as I am learning each time it is time to test our kids. I have an opportunity every week to read the entire test to the students, as they respond on a separate piece of paper. This experience was new to me because I feel like if I never got to visually see my test, I would do terrible; however others would rather it that way.  It confirmed how all students are diverse and have many different learning and comprehension styles. ( REC 5.12)

Jackson Heights- Reading Comprehension

Today during internship, I was facilitating students in one of the classrooms that were reading through an FCAT practice. The students first had to look at the title and pictures, discuss prior knowledge with a partner, and then determine if the text was going to be fiction or non-fiction. Students were then asked to read the second paragraph and make inferences, question the text, and continue to make connections. Students discussed all of these things with a shoulder partner as they continued to do this until the text was complete. Once the text was complete, students were asked both higher and lower thinking level questions. As I walked around the room, many students asked what the difference was between higher level questions and lower level questions. I had to explain to them that low level questions are questions that have direct answers and not much critical thinking is really involved.  I went on to explain that higher level questions do require critical thinking and more explanation is usually involved. (REC 6.6) (REC 6.8)

Jackson Heights-

Since I am a facilitator in my second placement, we are not able to focus on all subject areas for the students because there are to many students to work with every subject on. Therefor, we are particularly focusing on how students are doing in reading/language arts and the other facilitator is focusing on math/science with the same students. I was able to work with a student today and we focused on her vocabulary while reading. I was able to teach her how to use the Frayer Model. Throughout the book, I encouraged her to write down all the words she did not know. I then modeled to her as I divided my paper into four parts and then described the words using my own words, gave three interesting facts about the word, described what its like, and then described what it is not like. I then had her do the remaining of the words she wrote down on her own. ( REC 6.5)

Second Placement- Jackson Heights Middle

My new placement has been a whole different ball game. I was placed at Jackson Heights Middle as an ESE facilitator for kids with learning disabilities. The cool thing about my position is that I am seven different classrooms a day which gives me a chance to observe different teachers and their teaching styles. One of the first classes I observed was participating in a readers theater and it was the first time, outside of my education at UCF that I was so excited to see students acting out as they read. Because reader's theater is an oral performance of a script, it is one of the best ways to promote fluency. In the exercise, meaning is conveyed through expression and intonation. The focus thus becomes interpreting the script rather than memorizing it. ( REC 6.4)

Classroom Decorating

I thought it was appropriate to blog about my experience of re-organizing the classroom after school one day. Once Valentines Day was over, Mrs. Thurston mentioned she wanted to take down decorations and put up different colors and posters around the classroom. As we were doing this, we did a bit of reorganizing together as I suggested a few things that I have learned from RED 4601. Some of the things we did in her classroom was organize books based on genre, hang up students work, provide a comfortable area for students to read, hang up posters that reminded students of the time of year, labeled things around the room that related to the vocabulary words they are learning, and I took out the literacy centers and reorganized them for future use.
I was excited I had the opportunity to take part of this experience because it felt like a dirty house was just deep cleaned. I can see why it is important to provide a language rich and print rich environment for students. I noticed even the days after that the reorganizing provided a positive impact on children's motivation to read. They also showed a huge smile when walking in the following day because their work was displayed throughout the classroom.  Displays of student's work on bulletin boards add to the excitement of learning. (REC 6.2)

Valentines Day Lesson

The second lesson I taught in my first placement classroom was a math related lesson but my goal was to provide students with specific learning objectives before each lesson, providing feedback on the processes and strategies students use, and giving student’s time to consider how to approach a task. These simple strategies alone, help students promote metacognition.

My lesson plan was presented during the week of Valentine’s Day so I provided Valentine’s Day M&M’s for the students to eventually create a bar graph with. I wanted to actively engage my students so that it required students to use multiple learning skills and higher-order thinking to construct meaning and knowledge.

I modeled different cooperative learning strategies for students to use on their independent practice when it came to counting numbers and recording them on a graph. I grouped students heterogeneously and eliminated competition among groups.

I also modeled higher order thinking strategies to students so that they could use information to solve, analyze, and make predictions.

Overall, I feel that the lesson went really well and students benefited from learning how to work with each other and how to use instructional practices for metacognition. (REC 6.7)

Internship- Week 3

Week three of internship is still going wonderful. I was able to teach a lesson I created to the classroom as well as many other lessons that Mrs. Thurston had prepared previously. Being placed in a teaching position as a college student can be scary, but through this time I was able to model how I have seen Mrs. Thurston handle different difficult situations. The first lesson I taught to the classroom was a reading lesson. Since my students are so low functioning, I focused on vocabulary in the story and related new vocabulary words to prior knowledge. From this story, students developed a better understanding of the characteristics of love and allowed students to explore different concepts such as emotions, caring for one another, and regular daily activities. Throughout the story, we stopped and recognized different emotions the story was expressing using a board I created. I had students come up to the board and pick out the picture describing the emotion that I was reading about. I wanted to make the story interactive to promote hands on learning. Then I had students pick someone they know and love, and explain why they love them. This way the students were able to apply the words that they have learned. While reading, I made sure to speak slowly, distinctly, and write down key terms on the board. I created an interactive board and cut out pictures I found online of many different emotions and activities expressed in the book. As I read each page, I asked students if they could find a picture of the emotion or activity I mentioned from the group of pictures. I decided to use pictures on the board in order to emphasize visual literacy. The lesson went really well and I was glad to be able to provide vocabulary instruction to the classroom. After evaluating students, they seemed to get a great understanding of some of the words that were reviewed. (REC 6.5)