My first week of observations

I am observing an 8-grade Reading/Language Arts classroom. As I am from Washington State, I don't know a whole lot about the Colorado public education system, but Ms. Linda Garcia (my classroom teacher) has enlightened me on a few things and also on a few "tricks of the trade."

The state, it seems, has really buckled down on getting kids to read, so they have this "Accelerated Reader" program with certain novels the kids can read and computerized tests to assess their comprehension. Very interesting. Ms. Garcia has her students complete one book and a test every month--a big feat for an eighth grader, but very good for them. The state has also mandated that Junior highers read the book, "The Outsiders," as it deals with many of the social issues that students daily deal with. I haven't read it yet, but I hope to borrow one and read it soon.

The kids seem to respect Ms. Garcia quite a bit, so I'm glad that I got put in her classroom. She also has a lot of strategies that I can learn from. She gives the kids cartoon vocabulary and has them write down the words and make sentences out of them--that exercise includes many different learners from visual to kinesthetic. A simple strategy she suggested, also, is to write down the names of students, who have missed a class(es) and subsequently have missed homework, on the homework sheets so that I don't have to remember later on what homework they missed. It's little things like that that are good to know ahead of time.

All in all, observation is going well. I definately like the kids and they definately have multiple struggles from English-language learning to attitudes, but that's the challenge of the job!