April 11, 2016 - 09:49
What?
I visited the kindergarten classroom on Friday morning again this week, not my typical Monday afternoon. The routine was pretty much the same: morning meeting (in which two kindergartens shared a question or comment and their peers could add a comment or ask a question), reading groups, snack time, recess, teacher-led group activity. For this visit, however, the teacher let me take a student aside and read with them one-on-one. The first student breeze through the book and didn’t seemed interested or challenged by the reading. After reading the book he was originally assigned, he went to his “book box” and pulled out another at a higher reading level. He read this book with no trouble as well. The reading group wasn’t finished yet, so I told him he could go to the classroom library and pick out another book to read. He chose a Star Wars book, which I happily read with him. The second student that I was asked to work one-on-one didn’t like reading, but didn’t have too much trouble with it. He tried to read as fast as possible, so we could move on to a book that he liked more. Occasionally he would trip up on a word because he was trying to read so fast, and when this happened, I would ask him to take a breath and try again. We read two books together and had a pretty good time working together.
So What?
I was happy to take on a more involved role with this kindergarten class today. With my placement last semester, I had a similar role. I would pull a small group of students from the classroom and work on reading fluency with them. One time I even worked on math skills one-on-one with a student. I find that when I’m working as a student teacher in elementary school classrooms, I’m most frequently asked to help students with improving their reading skills. Early reading and math skills are important and persistently worked on in elementary school classrooms, which I hadn’t realized before.
Now What?
Because today felt like it went successfully, I wonder if, if I visited again during this time, I could work on reading skills with the same or different students. I enjoyed talking to the students one-on-one because I would ask them questions relating the text to their lives or just general questions to get to know them better.