Day 2: Sight Words

August 31, 2015

Today I started my one-on-one time with one of the students. I can already see this being an extremely rewarding experience. The class does centers every day. One of the centers is at the reading table with the classroom teacher. My one-on-one student, Mike*, is not yet on grade level for reading. My co-op and I decided he needs to be working on his sight words before moving on to reading text. Last week I prepared 4 sets of 10 sight words for him. The words came from his sight word assessment. Since he was not successful on the pre-primer list we used those words. On the first attempt Mike only knew 4 out of the 10 words. By the end of our session he correctly identified all 10. Tomorrow we will review those 10 words and depending on how he does will determine if we move on to the next set. Just getting him to improve on 6 words was extremely rewarding. I'm excited to see the progress he will make in my time working with him.

Today I also had my first experience in the 2nd grade classroom. I will periodically be in this room when the 1st grade class is at a special. While in this room I helped the students get their spelling notebooks prepared and I observed the teacher doing an introduction lesson on the new spelling words and short vowel sounds. I'm curious to observe the differences between 1st and 2nd grade.

During the student's math lesson they were learning about greater than, less than, and equal to. After the lesson the students did an activity where they played  "Math War". This game is a spin off of the classic card game, War. During my Teaching Math course last semester this was something that I observed in a teaching demo. When I observed it last semester the student used actual playing cards. During the lesson today the students used index cards that were numbered 1-20. I liked this better because the numbers were able to go higher than just 10. I had to think on my feet when my co-op realized she wanted the students to keep their own cards (and not collect both cards when winning a round like done in War the card game). I suggested using chips that were in the manipulative bin. The students received a chip if they won a round (if their card was greater), and if the students played the same number both students got a chip. This worked great and the students loved playing the game. This is definitely an activity I plan to use in my own classroom one day.


*Name changed