Since I have been blessed with jury duty on our Spring Break, I was able to observe at the Elias Howe School on Tuesday, March 22nd. I didn't want to schedule my final observation on Friday because I was unsure whether I would be selected to sit on a jury. If I had been, I would have lost a week or more of observation opportunities. I was told that if a person was chosen for jury duty, most cases last a week or two, but they were currently trying to assign people to 4 to 6 month long cases! Needless to say, I was nervous about that.
It was a very busy day last Tuesday in Ms. C.'s first grade classroom. The students were guided by their classmate, Callie, through the current day of the week including the month and year; they counted all the days of the month and named the days of the week; and they counted by tens, fives, and twos all the days that they have attended school. While observing Jhon during this morning meeting, I've noticed that he was mouthing the words or speaking with the class more often than at the beginning of my observations. He appeared to be a little more confident when reading aloud as a group, especially in this familiar context.
Then when we were about to begin their persuasive letter writing, Firefighter Tom came in for a talk on preventing fire. All the kids were paying the keenest attention on the firefighter and were eagerly answering his questions about playing with matches and fire alarms. We watched this really cheesy fire safety video called Be Cool About Fire Safety with Gilbert Gottfried as the fire alarm and Lindsey Lohan as the kid who burns the toast:
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/974dpi/be-cool-about-fire-safety
The kids really enjoyed the video and it brought about a lot of conversation. Before leaving, Firefighter Tom was nice enough to give the Ms. C. his home address so the kids could write him letters. The students have been writing letters to family and friends, but they haven't had the opportunity to send a letter through the post to someone other than a family member. When the firefighter left, we started thank you letters to Firefighter Tom. As I walked around, it seemed that all of the students, including Jhon, are getting a little better about picking specific details of what they enjoyed and including it in their writing. Previously, it took a lot of probing questions to get Jhon to think about what other important details he could put in his writing. With this writing assignment, Jhon picked out the details of the video that he liked and included these in his thank you letter.
Then we were interrupted again by a postman, so then there was another question and answer session with the students. Jhon was much more quiet and reserved during this portion of the day.
The rest of my day was filled with checking the students' homework because Ms. C. had forgotten her glasses that day. I was in a bit of a rush checking through all the homework in their homework folders, making copies of their differentiated homework packets for next week, and helping students who would approach me during my hectic moments. We also discovered that for some reason, the writing piece that I was intending to make a copy of for this case study is missing. It wasn't posted on the wall like it should have been, it wasn't with the ELL teacher, and it wasn't in his file of writing. Ms. C. and I exchanged emails and telephone numbers in case it pops up. Since I will be at the school for a couple of weeks for my other class, I can always swing by to pick it up later.
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