September 26, 2013
Ms.
Carretta was a little surprised to see me last Thursday—she didn’t know she
would have an observer. She quickly made me feel welcome, though. My partner,
Isabella, is in all Foundations courses, so I saw her there immediately. She
had made brigadeiros, a Brazilian sweet made with cocoa and sweetened condensed
milk. We discussed the recipe, and then Ms. Carretta moved into the lesson.
She
told the class, “So today, we are going to be catching up.” She realized they
didn’t know what the word meant, so she asked. Some students were familiar with
the word catch, so she used the board to draw a cat and talked about catching
the cat or catching up to it. To further explain, she drew a timeline, asking
students, “What day is today?” When they said, “Thursday,” she said, “Keep
going!”
“Thursday,
September 26th, 2013.” She explained that since yesterday they
hadn’t finished part of their lesson, they would have to do it today.
She then drew a picture of her and her
husband. “My husband can’t hear very well. So if I yell and he doesn’t hear me,
I have to run” (and she ran), “until I get next to him. I am catching up to
him.”
Ms. Carretta then
went over the story that the class had read the day before. It was about the
length of a long paragraph. She gave me her copy, and I saw she had highlighted
some vocabulary to go over (thrift shop, regular customer, volunteer, browse,
clerk, faded, couldn’t beat). She had asked the students to prepare answers to
comprehension questions the day before, and they went over them together in
class. The first question was interesting: what should the title be of the
story? One student offered the first sentence: “Bob went to the thrift shop.”
“Well, that’s a
little long to be a title,” Ms. Carretta explained. “Titles are usually long if
the passage is long, but for stories we read, one or two words are usually
good.”
“Thrift shop?”
“Bob and the
thrift shop?”
She accepted these
types of answers. I enjoyed that she didn’t seem hung up on students having
something exact, but just something to show they understood the story. I
noticed she corrected word order: “Shirt brown? Remember that an adjective
comes before the noun?” The students laughed and agreed. She also made a point
of calling on quieter students instead of the two or three that always wanted
to volunteer: “Wait, I’m asking him!” “Who have I not heard from?” She also
used the price of some of the clothes to review how to say _____dollars and
_____ cents.
After catching up,
we moved on to a lesson on –le words, like table or eagle. I was impressed that
all the students were comfortable with marking words to be pronounced. Ms.
Carretta often asked the students to come to the board to mark a word while the
other students marked it on their sheets. After a quick discussion of the
pronunciation of –le words, she had students come up and do some examples.
Then, individually, students chose the stems of words from a word bank to
create new words. “You can help each other!” she said while moving around the
room. Ms. Carretta then led the class in a discussion about words that the
students created, first from the word bank and then ones that they generated
themselves (like turtle). She assigned the back of the worksheet
(fill-in-the-blanks) for homework after a quick discussion of new vocabulary. I
was impressed by her familiarity with her students and easy guidance of their
activities. It’s clear that she is an experienced, accomplished teacher.
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