Week : October 27, 2008

For the first 50 minutes of class I worked one- on- one with my student. I let her choose one book that would be challenging to read. I had her start out by reading The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat that we had read the previous week. While she read I wrote down what words she substituted for words in the book. This book is at a frist grade reading level. She read 22 word incorrectly but for each word I would stop her, point to the word and say "lets try this one again". She self corrected 14 out of the 22 words. She knows the words in this book but she guesses the word instead of reading it based on the first/last letters of the word.
Some examples are:
said: correct word:

had has
his hers
hers her
bat brat
on in
goes got
sit sat
when then
will happen we have
fish dish
wont want
asking asked

I showed her to track the words one by one with her finger and then told her to think about the word before she said it. Since Halloween was that Friday she chose the book There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat. Although the book was more challenging she made less mistakes by taking her time and tracking the words with her finger. The mistakes were words that she didnt know rather then words she wasnt reading. She used picture cues for some of the words as well. After the story I had her tell me what the story was about. She simply said "about a lady who swallows a cat and a ghost". When I asked her quesdtions like "Why does she swallow them?" she is more inclined to answer. I asked her about 5 questions about the story and then had her write out some of the words from the book. If I hadnt written what words I asked her to spell I wouldnt be able to tell what she had written. For example, for swallow she wrote solow. for goblin she wrote gion and for bones she wrote bost. What is going to be very important to work on is sounding out words and sounds not only for reading but for spelling and comprehension. We need to work on putting sounds together and picking out sounds she knows in unfamiliar words to sound them out. After spelling the words I wrote down some of the words she had said and written incorrectly such as RATTLE, HOWL, THING, and CATCH. I asked her to find words she knew in these words and underline them. She underlined rat, how, in and cat. This helped because once she underlined words she knew, she was better at sounding out the other sounds of the words.

After the one on one time she had group reading with Ms. Abdu-Shakur and 4 other students. In group reading the students first asked what we mean by the word "I" and why it is capitalized in a sentence. Students understood that it talked about themselves and was different then writting the letter "i" in the word "in.

Mrs. Abdu-Shakur then introduced the students to a story they would be reading in their focus reading books. The story is about the Olympics with related vocabulary words. She wrote the vocab words on the board-ancient, host, stadium, medals, compete, earned, record and ceremonies. She then says the word, has them say it, gives the definition, explains the definition, gives the word in a sentence and then has the students come up with sentences using the word. The definitions were very simple. The students seemed confused with the words such as host however. They asked if the main character in a story would be considered the host. Ms. Abdu-Shakur gave the example of eating at Fridays and how the person who seats you is the host which the students then grasped.

After class we met with Ms. Abdu-Shakur to talk about where we would like to go from here and what she would like from us as teachers. She gave us a book to work on in the upcoming weeks and suggested we do some group work. Next week we, the grad students, decided we would do an "I wonder..." about the book, work on vocab from the book, and do a reading record of the first four pages of the book.