hollie_journal2

Journal #2 February 3, 2009

Like the previous assessment that I wrote about, this one also took place during reading time. This time, however, the teacher decided to use more of a KWL type of assessment. Today, the students listened to the teacher read a short story called //The Stories Julian Tells//, which was about making friends and how friends can learn from each other. Before reading, the teacher did a sort of pre-assessment to find out some information from the students. She asked questions like “What are some things friends can learn from each other?” and “Have you ever been new somewhere and had to make new friends?”. However, I noticed that when the students responded to these questions, their answers were vague, and the teacher had to ask them for specific examples. As part of the pre-assessment, the teacher made a stem chart on the board with the central focus being the words “making friends”. The students had to provide the teacher with different characteristics of making friends, and the teacher added those to the chart as stems. For instance, some of the students’ input included characteristics such as exciting, introducing yourselves, kindness, scared, and sharing talents. I thought that this stem chart was a good way to introduce the story, and it seemed to really give the students a good idea of the main theme of the story. I remember in my last journal, the teacher did an assessment on a reading, and in the reflection part of my journal, I wrote that it would have been helpful to involve some sort of organizer such as this to give students some background.

Once the stem chart was completed, the teacher started reading the story. As she read, she asked students questions about the reading, and she had them make predictions and mental pictures of the story in their minds. This story was about a girl named Gloria who is new in town. She becomes friends with a boy named Julian, and they show each other how to do different things. After the story was over, the students had to answer a question in their reader’s notebooks: “Will Gloria be a good friend for Julian? How do you know?”. Although this is the same form of assessment that was used last time, it was a bit more informal this time in the sense that the teacher gave some examples from the story before the students wrote their responses to give them some ideas as to what they could write about. Looking back now, I think she may have done this because this question was harder to answer than the last time. The teacher explained to the students that last time, they were able to find specific examples straight from the text. However, to answer this question, students would have to include more of their own experiences and compare them to Gloria and Julian’s situation because the answers would not be clearly shown in the text. Finally, to further help the students get started, the teacher gave them a model of how to begin their response: “Gloria will be a good friend for Julian.” She explained that this would be their topic sentence.

As I watched some of the students come up with their responses, I noticed that this time it was a little more difficult for them because they had to draw on their own experiences to answer the question, rather than simply reiterating specific instances from the text. They had to make a prediction about something based mainly on personal experience. However, it did help that the teacher tried to head the students in the right direction by giving them a topic sentence and by discussing some examples from the story prior to the students answering the question. As I said before, I also feel that the stem chart was a big help. Even though it wasn’t filled out during reading with examples from the story that could be used to answer the question, it was used to introduce the students to the story. The only thing that I would change about this assessment is that the teacher allowed the students to write their response during snack time. I found that many of the students were more interested in their snacks than writing their response, and they were easily distracted. For this reason, I probably would not have had the students do this during snack time.

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