hollie_journal5

Journal #5 March 3, 2009

The assessment that I observed today took place once again during reading, but it was done a little differently than usual and there were many different types of assessment involved. Today, the students read a story called //Rosie a Visiting Dog Story//, which was about a dog that was trained to help people. They read half of the story today, and they are going to finish it tomorrow. As usual, the teacher created a word web on the board, and before reading, she asked the students to name characteristics of obedience training. Many of the students’ responses included vocabulary words that were going to be in the story, so the teacher underlined them when she added them to the word web so the students would know that they were important. When they finished filling out the web, the teacher had the students pair up and talk briefly about their experiences, if any, with dogs. She then had them write in their reading journals //before// reading the story, which is not something I usually see. The topic they had to write about was something that they are confident in, and they had about 5 minutes to complete this quick write.

The students all seemed to be able to come up with something right away and had no trouble doing this quick write. When given the opportunity to share what they had written, I noticed that many of them had come up with good responses, but others said that they didn’t really have anything they were confident in, so their responses were not too relevant to the topic. Once a few students shared their entries, the teacher asked a few questions to get a discussion started about the story. She asked the students why they think it is important to be confident with your dog when you train it, and the students were able to give some good answers to the question. Then, since the class has been having some difficulty with the concept of main idea, the teacher defined what a main idea is, and she showed 2 sample paragraphs on the overhead. She had the students read each paragraph and asked for volunteers to point out the main idea of each. When she finished with this, she handed out sequence charts before beginning the story, which consisted of 2 columns titled “kinds of training” and “what Rosie learned”, and she had a copy on the overhead as well. These charts were filled out as a class while the teacher read the story. Finally, when the teacher finished reading the first half of the story, she had the students complete a vocabulary exercise worksheet which had a word bank at the top and sentences that the students had to fill in the blanks for. This was used to assess their understanding of the difficult vocabulary from the story.

Overall, I thought that this lesson was kind of all over the place, but the students seemed to handle it well. They did well with each different type of assessment, which almost surprised me because I thought they were going to get restless since so much was going on. If I were the teacher, I don’t think I would have used so many different worksheets, nor would I have gone back and forth so much. Although the students did well, I think they were getting a little restless because the teacher seemed to go from one thing to the other during this lesson. For instance, she went from orally assessing them to having them write in their journals, then giving them 2 paragraphs that were not from the story they were reading. She also gave the students the sequence chart and the vocabulary worksheet. I just think this may have been a little too much for the students, and if I could redo this, I might have tried not to break up the lesson so much.