The last visit I had to my elementary school was very different. I am helping out with the Walk to Intervention in the kindergarten classes helping to teach the students how to read. Last week the students were assessed to see who should move on to the next skill and who needs to repeat a skill. I was helping to give the assessments and it was very interesting to see how well some students did and how poorly others did. These children were at all different reading levels and yet all in the same classroom. It made me realize how frustrating it must be for the teacher to plan a lesson because of the range of ability she has in that one classroom. This week we had not yet resumed Walk to Intervention because they had not yet made new groups, so I was in the classroom helping out and observing. I was given a group of 3 boys and 3 girls and a stack of cards with pictures and letter tiles. The goal of the lesson was to have the students spell out the 3 letter word that was in the picture with the tiles. It was a disaster. First of all, these students still can’t distinguish between some letters for example a lowercase p or q, so even when I told them which letter they needed for their word they couldn’t find it by themselves in the pile. In addition, some of the students still don’t know what sound each letter makes or how to sound out a word. A few of the students got the hang out it with my help but others realized that they were not going to be able to do the activity and gave up before they even started.
I remember on my first day in the classroom the teacher was trying to get a hold of the parent of a student who had been absent for a few days. After calling a few different numbers, all of which were incorrect or unavailable, she gave up in frustration. She explained to me afterward how worried she was, if the child had been hurt or sick at school there would be no way to get in contact with their parent. Some other challenges with communicating with parents may be language. If your student’s parent speaks a different language or has a hard time communicating in English, it would make it very difficult to inform them on what their child needs at home to help them in school. According to Claude Goldenberg’s article Teaching English Language Learners, the majority of the parents of ELLs were not born in the U.S. so for a school that has a majority of Latino students there is a good chance that English is a second language for many of the parents. If I was going to be working in an elementary school where Spanish is spoken frequently, I would really try to learn as much Spanish as I could. Not only to be able to understand and communicate better with my students and their parents, but to show them that I really am doing everything that I can to help them out and make things easier.
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Spanish and several other languages are definitely going to be a problem for teachers. I think that every teacher should start to learn a new language if they do not know one already. Spanish is so commonly spoken now that some of our food labels are written in Spanish and English. I have decided to take on Spanish after taking a lot of French classes because I know that it will make me a better teacher because I will be able to understand and communicate with a huge percentage of people. I am so happy that you would try and learn Spanish too and I think that is a great idea. I am also having trouble in my classroom with letters. A lot of the students do not know the alphabet and cant sing their abc's. It seems like spelling a word out maybe too high of a skill for kindergartners to me. I think they need to keep practicing the recognition of letters before anything. My students keep getting lower case b's and d's confused and I said something to my teacher and she said that some will do that until around second grade. It is also interesting how the students think that a lower case "a" is different then an uppercase "A". This is where the parents can get involved and start to help their children out. At home they can just start singing the abc's once a day and maybe their will be some improvement.
ReplyDeleteHey Grace, Im actually in the same program with kindergarden students.I agree it was very interesting to see how some studets did very well while others did poorly. I was kind of surprised that the group of students you were working with didnt even know what some letter looked like. Its too bad that they are still stuggling with this skill. Do you think it has anything to do with english being a second language or are these students english speakers?
ReplyDeleteI defenitly agree that learning a second language would be extremly beneficial to the students and to the parents. Teachers would be able to help their students more if they understood the students language.
Hi Grace, I had the same question as Samantha. Were the students that had the most trouble with the assessment ELLs? If so then I think it is much more difficult for them to learn English, than a student with English as their first language. It is both difficult for the student and the teacher to keep up in the classroom. In Claude Goldenberg’s research, he found that teaching students to read in their first language promotes higher level of reading achievement in English. If the students that were having the most trouble were ELLs, then maybe they are having such difficulty because they did not learn how to read in their first language. Goldenberg says that literacy and other skills and knowledge transfer across languages. Meaning if you learn something in one language, you either already know it in another language or can more easily learn it in another language. ELLs have a hard time enough learning English, but if they have not learned how to read in their first language, than it is must more difficult for them to learn how to read in English.
ReplyDeleteI think it is a great idea for you to learn Spanish for both you and the students. In the classroom I volunteer in many students speak Spanish. One little girl always asks me if I can speak Spanish and when I say a little bit she asks me a question in Spanish. It is hard for me to answer her in Spanish because I can determine what people say much better than speaking it myself. The last time I was at the school, a boy who spoke Spanish was talking to a boy that did not know a word of Spanish and he was saying that he was stupid and ugly. I could understand most of what he was saying, so I made it a point to speak to him about not saying things like that. He was very surprised I knew what he was saying and stopped. I also want to be able to understand more Spanish and speak it myself. It is an excellent skill not only as a teacher, but in life to know different languages.