CO 1: Caitlin (Reading)

I observed Debbie Carretta’s class for reading and it was great! The class was a foundations class and Debbie used every opportunity to incorporate new vocabulary into the class. She starts each class with small talk to lower the affective filters of her students and to introduce them to new vocabulary or schema. The day that I observed her, she had a swollen spider bite and started the class by explaining what had happened. She had me introduce myself and since my name happens to be the same as her daughter-in-law’s name, she talked with the class for a while about her family and talked about the relationship between herself and her son’s wife. She utilized the whiteboard to introduce vocabulary as she shared her stories.  

The lesson was a reading comprehension exercise. Different students in the class read a sentence from a story about chicken soup that was projected on the board. Then, Debbie turned off the projector and asked the class questions about the story. She told me that this was the first time that the students had had to answer questions without being able to reread the passage so she wasn’t going to grade it  but that it was important that they are reading for comprehension and answering questions from memory helped develop this. Debbie made sure that each student participated in the class and managed the class by calling on students by name.

The class ended with a game of 20 questions. Debbie gave the instructions of the game with the scaffolding framework of what a question involves and some vocabulary that would help the students narrow down the questions to figure out the object she was thinking about. It was a fun activity and the class got really into it especially when they were down to 2 questions!! This was my favorite class observation of the day.