A little background information before I get started. I am a junior elementary education major at Illinois State University. I am currently working on developing my personal learning network through the use of blogs, twitter, and other useful tools. I have little experience with this, and over the last few weeks I have been searching for a few blogs to help me in my lesson planning for clinicals. First, I will talk about that and then about my clinical.
Each semester education majors are required to partake in clinicals, which is a step towards teaching in our own classroom. Each semester I have had a teacher who tells us exactly what we are going to teach, how much time to spend on it, what level the student is at, etc. It never felt like I was learning a lot about reading my students until this year.
Our first clinical of the semester we knew the age of our student and their gender. I have worked with children before, but having to teach based on getting to know my student and understanding their strengths and weaknesses, that was a whole new ballpark. I read a few blogs from different people about activities that had been done, tips for clinicals, and other important ideas, and soon came to realize that these 3 years of school have prepared me for this very moment. I used Kathy Cassidy's blog to come up with a few ideas to bring in to my lessons. I found that her use of technology is something I want to incorporate into my lessons. I also used a blog by Michelle, in which she gives important aspects about clinicals, like staying positive, being clear, and importantly being professional as well as many more. Overall I felt that this bit of blog searching I did really opened my eyes to all of the tools the internet provides to us.
I have a student who is a first grader. This student likes to stand and move. He/she is an athlete and very active both at school and after school. I noticed that there was constant movement during the lesson, to keep focus on book we were reading. This student wanted to work on other projects, such as coloring, talking, etc rather than the task at hand, but when we were working, we accomplish everything planned. We have read two books so far, and I have realized that this student struggles with larger words. In the role of a teacher, I picked books by level for the first meeting from scholastic book wizard one was a 1.9 (Rumble in the Jungle) and the other was a level 2.2 (Henry and Mudge). The student struggled with some words in "Rumble in the Jungle" such as ravenous, ladyfriend, gorgeous, ferocious, and wallop. Then, in Henry in Mudge, the student only messed up Henry's name, saying Harry, which was not a meaning changing error. It did not effect the story the the student did not notice. I have loved my first week of clinicals, and after talking with my teacher I know one idea for the semester is to work on strategies to help the student to read larger/harder words, and help with improving their vocabulary. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog! I would love any feedback you may have or suggestions on what you would like me to blog about!
