September 22, 2015
Previously in Day 8's post I talked about my Monday one-on-one time with Tyler*; the seventh grade learning support student. Last week he was very shy and I had time getting more than a word or two from him. Today it was like I was with a whole new student. He was much more engaged in the material we were working on and he also shared a lot more about himself with me. One task we completed was a practice spelling test. He took the test on the wall mounted white board. This definitely gave him a better attitude towards the activity. There were only 4 words out of his 26 that he misspelled. I talked to him about spelling always being a challenge for me. He asked me what I do to improve my spelling. I showed him a few strategies, an example of one is below.
I read the word "reachable".
Tyler spelled the word "recheable"
Strategy (I told this verbally to Tyler): Break the word into two parts reach-able. Look at the first part, "reach". What words do you know that sound like reach?
Tyler replied: Teach
I told him to write "teach" on the board. As soon as he wrote "teach" he realized "reach" was spelled r-e-a-c-h. He wrote that and added the suffix -able.
I felt like I could see the light bulb go off for Tyler when this strategy clicked.
Later in the day my first grade class worked in their "Kidwriting" notebooks. Students draw a picture and write a story to pair with it. Once they finish either myself or the classroom teacher do adult writing in the notebook and set a goal for the student for the next story. The students vary drastically for each student. Some students are already to the point where we want them to work on extending their stories by adding more detail. Other students have goals that are much more basic, like using punctuation and capital letters. I flipped back in the notebooks to the student's first story and it is remarkable how much improvement has already been made. I can't imagine the difference there will be by the end of the year.
*Name changed
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