Week 14

Describe and evaluate the approaches you observed from the classroom:

From the classroom I observed, the teacher has built up a classroom library for kids where they can borrow books every week and students would share their reading experiences with the others in class. Share reading and independent reading is applied into daily teaching.

For extended reading, the teacher would pick up a book for the whole class to read together every two weeks. The books are usually a little bit beyond children’s ability and always related to social study. After finishing those books, students are required to hand in their logs. Also, each student were required to pick up one new word, explain with their own words and then let others guess what the word is. I love this method because it allows students to make connections with their personal experiences.

With students who needed extra help, they have a specialist assisting the teacher. She took responsibility with students who needed more exercises or explanation.

How much time will you schedule for student writing?

For my future teaching, I will definitely allocate at least one hour everyday for writing as it is a very important part of ELA.

How do you structure this time to support and advance student writing?

    I will share advanced model writings with students before their writing. I will use differentiation writing approaches for students at different levels as well.  

How do you increase opportunities for students to improve their writing?

I will make my students keeping diaries or journals every day. I will also encourage them to keep down every new idea occurs to them in their daily life on their notebooks.

How do you balance student choice with teacher choice of writing topics?

    I will do it half and half. Maybe half of the week I will let them focusing on topics picked by me and leave them to choose their own topics for the rest of the week.

What challenges/questions do you have in scheduling adequate time for writing?

Maybe the challenge is that it is hard to organized students at different writing levels in limited time.