Cunningham School for Excellence- Field Experience

I just started my field experience for my literature class at Dr. Walter Cunningham School for Excellence. This is my first time being able to work alongside the students in this district and in Waterloo! I am working with second grade and going through a thematic unit all about going to the zoo! There is one specific second grader that I am able to work with and I was able to meet her on Thursday. We started by introducing ourselves and finding out a little bit about each other. The first thing we did was the FAST word testing. This test is done by seeing if the student can identify all 50 words and if not, taking notes of which ones they missed. My second grader was able to go through all 50 words in under 2 minutes. She didn't seem to have any problems identifying or reading the words. We then talked about how we were going to be learning about animals in the zoo when I came every Thursday. She seemed very excited and willing to learn about the different animals.

We then read the book Animals I See at the Zoo: Penguins by JoAnn Early Macken. This book includes facts and characteristics about penguins, and allows the student reading to gain more knowledge about that specific animal. This is a good book for second graders because it gives them facts about these animals and they can leave with more knowledge after reading the book.

 

While reading the book, she was able to read a majority of the words without help. There were some that she was able to identify and pronounce some of the letters in the word, but overall, had said the wrong word. We did echo reading on a couple pages that she was struggling on and it helped her to hear how the word was supposed to be pronounced.

I think that the instructional decisions I used were effective and allowed me to see where the student was at the start of meeting her. I was able to keep her engaged and listening. I think the only thing that could have gone smoother was the transitions between what we had to do during the lesson. She had wanted to know what the student next to us was learning about, just out of curiosity, so that was the only thing that she got distracted from. Next time, being able to implement some of the reading strategies we discussed in class would allow me to help her grow as a reader. It was challenging with so many other people around, I think it made it a little harder to focus, but overall I thought it went really well.

I am very excited for the weeks to come and I think that as I work one-on-one with this student more, I will be able to find out what she really likes to learn about and the ways she learns best. Moving forward, this will be the best way I can learn her strengths and weaknesses when it comes to reading and literature.