Weekly Summary #3

Weekly Summary #3

January 29th-31st, 2019
Meghan Taylor

     In the CSS classroom, everything is going much smoother with the addition of an actual teacher.  Before, it was just hectic and chaotic.  I felt very stressed just walking into the room beforehand, but now there is a sense of organization.  While the teacher is very new and does not have her degree in education, she is great with the kids.  She has them on a schedule that they have already begun to memorize and there is greater parity amongst the children.  Of course, there are a couple that cannot sit at the same table or even look at each other across the room, but progress is certainly being made.

     In the first-grade general education room, Tuesday did not allow for much work to be done due to Mrs. Friendly, the police officer, talking to the kids.  She certainly wound them up and I am not entirely sure how some of the teachers would be able to get their students to work for the rest of the day.  But, they did have a lot of fun.  On Thursday, I assessed 3/4 of my students (one was absent) on the phonics assessment.  They all knew their letters, and most of them knew their letter sounds.  One repeated occurrence for many of the kids were switching sound names for 'b,' 'd,' 'p,' and 'q.'  They could sound out the word, even for the nonsense words, but they greatly struggled with this part of the recognition aspect. 

     For future lessons, I also noticed that the kids struggled with blending sounds together, especially on common diagraphs such as 'sh,' 'ch,' and 'th.'  This will be an important lesson to teach them and even allow them to become better at recognizing their sight words.  

     The only problem I seem to run into is the lack of time with these kids.  While Ms. Mayer would like us to focus strictly on sight words, the phonics assessment shows that there needs to be an emphasis on this too with the kids.  With the little time we have after morning announcements, it might be difficult to find a way to encompass both sight word practice and phonics into lessons.