Week 3

Hildi Perez's First-Grade Class

Looking Closer – Assignment 1

Shared Reading

During the shared reading activity, Ms. Perez addresses several Essential Components of Literacy Development. By pointing out rhyming sounds, she helps improve students’ oral language skills and phonological awareness. Additionally, she cues her students to promote word identification and phonics, and through reading together, her students practice fluency and automaticity in an enjoyable manner.

By reading the poem together as a class, Ms. Perez engages students at all levels of literacy development in the learning. Weaker students are presented with an opportunity to hear language and observe its corresponding phonological representation.

When Ms. Perez poses questions to children, she modifies the question to assist children who are at lower levels of literacy development. She offers redirection and prompts to get students to answer correctly and help them develop their problem-solving skills. For example, when a student thinks the letter “b” is a “d”, she visually presents a “d” on the board to help him understand his mistake. Additionally, she motivates children to think and problem-solve by manipulating and substituting individual sounds in the poem.

As seen in Ms. Perez’s class, shared reading can be used to promote reading fluency and oral language. Shared reading promotes literacy as a social activity and the teacher can use the text of the shared reading to teach new skills such as word identification and phonics. Strategies such as sounding out words, creating rhymes, and teaching about short vowels vs. long vowels can now be taught in an engaging and exciting way. Students are actively involved because they are motivated, and by interacting with her students, the teacher can see how much the children understand and what they may be struggling with.

Guided Reading

Ms. Perez asks her students to verbalize strategies that they use in reading because this way they internalize their strategies and it also affords students the opportunity to learn from each other.

By covering words and having students predict what the words may be according to the context of the story, Ms. Perez helps her students build meaning in text.

Differentiated Instruction          

In Ms. Perez’s classroom, every learner can find an area in which to be successful and every student can learn how to read and write in a way that is suited to his/her individual needs.  The classroom is set up in a way that supports a wide range of learners with many different learning centers and activities. Students work in groups, partners, and independently. Additionally, Ms. Perez divides her students by ability and provides each group with learning activities catered to their respective level. She conducts guided reading groups and brings in an assistant who also works directly with students.

Ms. Perez interconnects reading and writing in her classroom in many ways. During a read-aloud, students learn the correct writing and grammar. Students’ interest in topics they have read about makes a great opportunity for them to attempt writing on their own. Ms. Perez encourages her students to read their own writing and self-check for errors. Sometimes, she will compile students work and use that as a read-aloud.

Assessment

By regularly assessing students and tracking their progress, Ms. Perez sees where students are up to and determines what her next instructional strategies will be. She also uses assessment to group children that are at the same level together in order to make her teaching most effective for every child.

As a teacher, I would aim to integrate formal and informal assessment on a regular basis to help me properly establish and plan my long-term and daily instructional goals and strategies.