SPSE 6712-Observation #1

I have been working at Mitchell Neilson Primary for my fieldwork and am really enjoying it! They have a sort of special circumstance because they share the ELL teacher with the elementary school as well. This doesn’t give her a lot of time to spend with each student. However, she has the kindergarten students for an hour everyday so I go during that time. This is what I observed during that time:

Teaching/ Ethnographic Perspective

The purpose of the lesson that I observed was to work on the students letter recognition skills. The teacher gave each student a dry erase board and asked them to draw a sad face on one side and a happy face on the other. Then, she gave them each a sentence strip with their names on it. She would choose a letter from a set of index cards to show the students. If the letter was not in their name then it made them sad : ( and they had to write that letter on the sad side of their board. If the letter WAS in their name than they were happy : ) and they got to write it on the happy side of their board. I thought that the lesson was very appropriate for the students. For the ones that were very low level it was good that she gave them their name cards because they were still in the matching stage of letter recognition. However, I thought that for the higher level learners it would have been beneficial to take away their names cards to see if they could recognize its presence in their name from memory.
The students really seemed to respond to the activity well and enjoyed making very sad or happy faces once they found the letters. I also liked how the teacher did not put a lot of stress on the student’s letter formation. Many of them struggled with writing the letters correctly. She would simply show them once how to make the letter, allow them to try, and then praise them for their effort. I think this was really important for them not to get discouraged or give up trying. It will come with practice. An observer would hardly notice the ELL group that is pulled out in each Kindergarten room. The classrooms are fairly large and she always pulls her ELLs out at a time when the rest of the class is at their desks. This way, she can take her group to one of the centers that are blocked off and not disturb the class. Sometimes this strategy is frustrating because they have to be very quiet in their small group. They aren’t able to do certain activities like sing songs or play noisy games because they would disturb the class. The teacher is very inviting and accepting towards her ELL students. Even though she has them for a very short amount of time she always asks them how their day is going and gives them a chance to share their feelings. The students are all happy to see her and are excited about going to her group. She does a very good job of making them feel special that they get to come see her. They don’t feel excluded at all from the rest of their class.

Community

When the ELL teacher works with the kindergarteners she goes into one class at a time and pulls the ELL students to a quiet spot in the room. All of the classes have at least 3 ELLs so it makes for good sized small group instruction. While the activity was for each individual student to recognize the letters in their own name, the students would help each other look for the letters. They all seemed to get along and want each other to find the letters. One student even said, “I am sad there is no A in my name, but I’m happy it’s in yours!” I thought that was so sweet! Most of the ELL students the teacher pulls out in kindergarten are level 1 proficiency according to their ELDA scores. They are seen by the ELL teacher every day. However, there is one student that scored a 3 on the ELDA but will still qualify for consultation services from the ELL teacher because the language spoken at home is Arabic.