First Week of Observation

On Wednesday, February 9th, I attended P.S. 51 Elias Howe School once again to observe in an elementary school classroom.  I was pleasantly surprised when I was assigned to a teacher who I have worked with once before last year, Ms. Abby C..  Ms. C. taught kindergarten for the last 23 years, but is now currently teaching first grade.  She told me that it really helps that she had several of her students last year.  They already had a relationship and they could try out first grade together.
Ms. C. was the first teacher I have ever worked with and, so far, she is my absolute favorite!  I spent the whole day with her and her class observing and helping out students where ever I could.  When the students were in music class, Ms. C. and I had a chance to talk.  Apparently, she specializes in literacy as well and English.  Also, surprisingly, she had taken many theater courses in college and said that Elizabethan English was her forte.  I also discussed with her the purpose of my observation and as soon as I said the words "ELL case study" she immediately interrupted me with "Jhon!".
Ms. C. gave me a thorough background of the student as well as copies of all his previous assessments.  Jhon's family moved here from Ecuador in the middle of last year.  He, his parents, and his grandmother moved to New York City after his father, a former professional soccer player, chose to make the move to the United States.  All three adults in his life do not speak English at all.
When Jhon arrived last year, he did not speak any English, but by the end of the year, his conversational English improved but his reading level was left at A.  Then his parents took him back to Ecuador for two months and he completely forgot all the English he had learned.  Ms. C. dared to say that he may have taken two steps back in his English acquirement.
Currently, Jhon is reading at level D when the benchmark for first grade at this time is approximately G/H.  According to his assessments, he is at the early alphabetic level or phase.  Ms. C. also told me that he is a timid child but eager to try.  Many times when he makes a mistake, he shuts down.  He is also sitting with a group of students who also speak Spanish but are fluent in English.  Even with this sitting arrangement, he hesitates to ask for help when needed.
I had the opportunity to introduce myself to Jhon and he is a very sweet little boy.  I asked him if he would mind me listening to him read for a little while and he said he didn't mind.  He read two books to me.  The first was a narrative about a game of hide and seek.  He read enthusiastically but whenever he didn't know a word, he would skip over it or make up something that would seem to make sense.  For example, the book had the repetitive line "Nobody there" and instead he would say "not there" or "not here".  The other book was an expository piece about maps that he seemed to enjoy reading.
At the end of the regular school day, I observed Ms. C. teach a small literacy intervention group during extended time.  The teachers use guidelines from a program called Fundations by the Reading and Writing Project of Columbia.  The lesson was geared toward helping the students achieve phonemic awareness, or as the book presented it, blending and chunking.  In order to spell five given words, Ms. C. urged the students to tap out on their fingers each sound that they hear of a word.  The word mash was one of the given words.  Ms. C. modeled tapping out M-A-SH and then the students did it along with her.  Then they would try spelling it on their dry erase boards.  I thought this was a really good mini lesson that I could easily use myself.
All in all, I was extremely pleased with how my first observation day went and I am excited to go back.