Observation post, obs #2

My second observation in our 488 classroom took place Feb 22 from 9:15am to 11:15am. When I arrived, students were in their seats looking for vocabulary words (beside which they had already written down the definitions) in the text they were currently working on (an excerpt from Island of the Blue Dolphins, published in their basal readers). After students were finished, they were able to retrieve the "perfect paragraphs" they had been working on from the teacher and continue to work with them. The teacher asked me to circulate the room and help students with their paragraphs. According to the assignment, their paragraphs would be perfect when they were both interesting and grammatically correct. The paragraphs I read were very diverse, but also extremely interesting from an assessment point of view in that each paragraph aptly reflected the personality and interests of the student (especially since the subjects were chosen by the student). For example, one of the students, Adam, wrote his paragraph on Dwayne Wade, an NBA star, and I know that Adam loves basketball (it's most of what he writes about). On the other hand, Ina, who I know to be a high-achieving student and something of a teacher's pet, wrote her paragraph on adverbs (which happened to also be the grammar study for the day). The paragraphs, as whole, were very good. I had to note a few spelling problems and some problems with grammar (which students generally recognized and fixed when I asked them to read over the sentence for me), but I would say that the largest problem I found was punctuation, specifically commas after dependent clauses. I thought this was an interesting point, and as a teacher, I might use this information to inform future grammar/writing lessons.
As a side note--or perhaps simply a bit of a tangent--this exercise reminds me of something that the teacher had told us about her approach to writing in the fall. She told us that for the first quarter, she allowed her students to write as they knew how--encouraging and focusing more on the act of writing than on the grammar and spelling involved. Then, she said, in the second quarter, she began to put more emphasis on the construction of the writing: its grammar and spelling, for example. During language arts since second quarter, some of the period (at least once a week) is devoted to particular grammatical features. Last semester, I remember them working on subjects and predicates during one lesson. This semester, during this lesson (post-paragraph writing), they went over, filled out and reviewed an adjectives and adverbs handout. I really like this approach to writing because I think it encourages students to write and get comfortable with simply writing before requiring multiple things of them in terms of construction. I think that if the requirements for perfect grammar, etc. were there from the start, students might never get comfortable with writing because they're too overwhelmed. Writing is important, and I think this really shows that emphasis.
As noted in the above paragraph, the teacher shifted gears after the perfect paragraph-editing to a handout on adjectives and adverbs. I worked especially with Adam, who at first was completely confused and frustrated. After modeling one for him, we worked on some together and I tried to take away some of my support with each one so that by the end he could do them on his own. Sure enough, he was circling those adverbs and underlining the adjectives like nobody's business by the last item, and the smile on his face was huge. It's amazing how giving a little support in the beginning makes such a difference, especially for students who may have low confidence in their academic abilities (as Adam sometimes does).
At 10:30, two parents came in to talk about quilting (in the place of a regular science lesson) and then handed out materials so that students could create their own quilt-like patterns on paper squares. These paper squares were then handed to me, and I stapled them up on the bulletin board, creating a "paper quilt" on the wall. The students really got into the activity, though in some ways I'm still trying to understand how the activity relates to what they're doing in class. Maybe it doesn't...and maybe that's okay.
At 11:15, students stayed in the classroom for lunch because they were having a going away party for one student who was moving to another state that weekend.