Week 5: Building Oral Language video + Running Record

In a diverse classroom of students with varying levels of language ability, Ms. Wilson was effective in providing grade appropriate literacy instruction while respecting the skills each student brings to the classroom.  In the video, despite having a bilingual aide, the teacher did not rely heavily on the resource to connect with students who are learning English as second language.  Instead, she differentiates instruction and keeps each child engaged.  For example, some children show the ability to read independently while she works with others who need more guidance. 

While the classroom is surprisingly large, Ms. Wilson maximizes the space with separated learning centers so her students can have varied experiences during their kindergarten day working in smaller groups.  This keeps the children engaged, helps them build social and language skills through small group interaction, and offers numerous opportunities for the teacher to observe, guide and instruct her students individually.  A challenge for other educators would be how to emulate this room set up when classrooms are typically smaller than the one shown in the video.

Ms. Wilson’s calm, patient and positive manner with her kindergarten students reaffirmed the effectiveness of the approach of another kindergarten teacher I observed in the past.  Her routine, organization, leadership, and pace appeared to keep her young students in a respectful order even when the children were excited over their classmate’s drawing at the end of the video.  Her expert instructional practice and frequent encouragement provides her students with confidence in their abilities as shown by this shy student who was able to develop and demonstrate his ability to tell the class a story through illustration and words.  The culture and environment she sets in the classroom are effective to help the students develop academically, socially and emotionally.  There is a lot in this video that an aspiring educator like me can incorporate into future practice. 

In future classroom observations of lower grade classes, I will pay closer attention to the different learning centers and how the classroom is organized.  For an experienced educator like Ms. Wilson, these nuances have been developed over her teaching years and much can be learned from her practice.  In upper elementary grades, I will observe how the teacher creates small groups so they can learn through interaction like the young students did in the video.

Running Record Practice

Errors

1. Mispronounced “Kobe” as “Koby”

2. Mispronounced “can’t” as “can”

3. Tried to twice to correctly pronounce “Vishnu Chatterjee”

4. Mispronounced “Kobe” as “Koby”

5. Mispronounced ”reached” as “reaches”

351 total words, 5 errors

Error rate = 1:70

Accuracy rate = 99%

Self-correction rate = n/a

While the student was able to read the two pages with relative ease, the errors he made appeared to be careless ones.  Twice, he mispronounced the name of the main character because the nickname used twice in this passage varied by just one letter from the person’s real name.  “Koby” and “Kobe” can be easily confused but also identified as different with more careful reading,  Another character’s name was indeed tricky and the reader had to take some more time to phonetically sound it out.   The fifth error can be attributed to a tricky change in tense in the story.  The previous paragraph begins with a character musing, “Looks like I could see my name in print tomorrow.”  The next paragraph continues the story in past tense and the reader misread “reached” as “reaches”.

I would work with the student to read with more attention paid to detail.  With this learning objective as the focus, I would select my favorite Dr. Seuss book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”   The student will read selected passages of the book aloud with care as frequent repetition, poetic-like phrases, occasional rhyming, and alliterations can easily cause a careless reader to make errors.  After calculating the reader’s error, accuracy and self-correction rates (pre-assessment) and elapsed time to read the passage, I would guide the student to re-read the same passage at a slightly slower rate with more pauses and breathing.  The student’s performance will serve as the post-assessment and hopefully satisfies the learning objective of reading with more attention to detail.  The difference in elapsed time should be small which should give the student confidence that increased care in reading does not have to cost much more time.  I think this is an important detail to share with the student who may be reading too quickly just to get through a passage.