SOAR Day 1

Today I got to sit in on Mr. Spencer's 4^th grade summer reading class. This was an interesting experience for quite a few reasons: 1^st the class times were  short, 2^nd the classes varied in number of students, 3^rd it was the first day so the majority of class was introductions, 4^th most of the students already had a firm grasp on English, while others had very low proficiency, and 5^th Mr. Spencer was not an elementary teacher, and today was his first time ever teaching elementary. This last point was fun to observe, because Mr. Spencer was trying to adapt his registrar and lesson plans to appeal to a younger learner. He told me that he had trouble coming up with a lesson plan since he had no idea what a 4^th grader actually found enjoyable to do. Unfortunately I did not get to see some of his lesson plans since today was focused on administrative thing, and getting to know one another. But, from what was done in class they seemed very effective. Most of the class we ran with introductions, Mr. Spencer lowered the affective filter by telling the students where we are from, how big our families are, why we are teaching English, and so-on. He then asked the students about their lives, some students were very vocal, while others were to shy to speak. Afterward, we did some pre-activities to build schemata through posing the question “I could not live without (blank)” and asking the students to think about those necessities that we believe we must have in our lives. I noticed this helped get the class on track towards the first lesson. One of the classes consisted of only two Marshallese boys who were very shy, and whose reading skills were quite low. Therefore, we ignored most of the background stuff and jumped straight into the lesson. He had the boys distinguish between the /ou/ sounds and spellings, for example the words; ‘ouch’ ‘brown’ and ‘grow’. He had them draw a chart to separate each sound and gave them words to write in each column. After this pre-activity, we opened up a very simple story book and had the two boys read aloud to us the entire book. We were looking for any pronunciation errors. The two boys had some difficulties while reading the book, but overall did very well in pronunciation. Lastly, he gave the boys a copy of the book and asked them to continue practicing at home. The last class of the day was also fairly informative, Spencer introduced the book they will be reading for the week, which was a "reading-level J” (?) story about a some kids who are out to solve a mystery at a castle in Maine. Since some of the vocabulary was new, Spencer had the kids think about what the word might mean in reference to a castle – such as the words “mote” and “drawbridge.” Once the students had a gander at the definition (some of them knew already) Spencer gave a quick explanation and then showed a short clip from YouTube to illustrate. He read the first chapter aloud while the students sat and listened, well most of the students listened others kept talking. Time went pretty quick, so we had to cut off pretty early. I talked to Mr. Spencer after class and he was telling me that today was probably as much of a learning experience for him as it was for me, since it was his first day doing this. The last thing I want to mention is the student management during school. It was pretty interesting to see how well the students followed the instructions of the faculty, but also the techniques used by the faculty to manage them. For instance, one system at the end of the day had the students line up in certain parts of the hallway depending on what their transportation was for going home. Overall, a good experience!