Week 5: Fourth Day in the Classroom

Week 5: Fourth Day in the Classroom

Date: Thursday, September 30^th, 2021

By: Monica Schrank  

I had another great day observing and being in the classroom again with the students! My MT was teaching the students a new technique in class this week for math called the make 10 strategy. I have never heard of this strategy before and when my MT first showed me how to do before class started, I was so confused and was worried that the students would be too. After showing me the strategy, my MT asked me how I felt about the strategy, and I mentioned that I was worried that the students would maybe be confused with this strategy of addition and subtraction but she reassured me that with her help and my help the students would be able to understand it (plus she said that they would be reviewing this strategy for two days, which would help even more). When the students were first introduced to this strategy, I actually started to understand how to do it, which was great because I was able to help the students who needed help. After a few problems that the class did together with my MT, she asked the students who were not ready to solve the problems on their own or that needed more help to meet with me at the teacher table where we would go over some more problems together step by step. I was able to work with seven students on the make 10 strategy which was beneficial for me because I was able to go slower and breakdown the different steps of the strategy more for the students so they could understand it better. Some of the students were able to leave if they were more confident with working on the problems on their own, while I continued working with the rest of the group. I truly enjoyed helping these students because sometimes student will be confused and are afraid to tell the teacher, which can cause them to fall behind. Being able to help those students not only helped them to understand the make 10 strategy better but allowed me to be the “teacher” and learn how to breakdown the different steps in a simpler way.  

I was also able to be a part of the students’ Daily 5, where the students work in groups to practice a specific skill while the other students read independently. I was given the opportunity to work with three groups on the skill of word fluency by reading words with ‘s’ blends and short vowels. I worked with each group by teaching them how to break up the letters in a word to make it easier for them to sound out the word, which can make it easier for them to read those words. My MT allowed me to have the students use pop its to help them as they are segmenting and breaking up the combination of the letters of the words. I used different colored highlighters to segment the words to show how the words are sounded out. The students even used their pencils to circle the different segments of the words to help themselves to remember how to pronounce/sound out the words. For example, for the word stop, the students would say the letters “st” and press one of the pop its down, and then say the letter “o” and press another pop it down, and say the last letter “p” and press another pop it down. The students would do this for all of the words to help them to visually understand how to sound out their words, break them up, and have fun while doing it! I really enjoyed having the opportunity to teach this skill to the students because this skill is very important. Some students can have difficulty pronouncing or sounding out words and how the letters are grouped when pronouncing them. The more students are able to segment letters of words to sound them out as they pronounce them, the better readers they will be! I cannot wait to come back next week and see what other skills I will be able to help teach to the students!