Rebekah Rodrigues

EDTE 440

Field Journal #3

3/9/11, 8:15am-12pm

This day I arrived at Sycamore and the students were working on readings out of their curriculum work books. There was an odd number of students so I worked with one when they were taking their reading test where one student reads out lout while the other students marks how many errors they made. They tally up the progress in a form at the end of their book so the teacher can see how well they have been reading. The young student I worked with was sweet and it was a pleasure to help him along. The class in the morning is made up of the students who performed lowest on whatever kind of assessment test they administered to the children and so there is a combination of students with disabilities and English language learners.

The student I worked with that particular day was an English language learner and he had trouble with certain definitions of words, because they were ones he had not yet acquired into his vocabulary. The period ended and the class changed.

During the next period I often go with Ms. Cano to observe the work done with J and B.

This week Ms. Crane was not present so we did class in the classroom but Ms. Cano still worked with the two students in a small group. They were working on formulating sentences that had to do with location. They were given a list of names of items that you would find around town and they were supposed to use only questions in order to communicate where things were. For example: “do you know where the school is?” “Is it the school by the bank?” “Which bank? Do you mean the bank on the other side of the park?” This was a lesson that helped the students use practical application for language because directions are something that are going to be needed, especially since both students are relatively new to the country. We worked on this activity for a while but I could see that the students were struggling with it. As I learned in my English class about second language acquisition, question formulation is a very complex process and I think that maybe these types of questions might have been advanced for what they are able to formulate on their own. We helped them along though, and I think maybe it was helpful for us to model what they were being asked to do so they could have an idea of what was expected of the assignment. What they didn’t finish they took home as homework.