Today I observed Sana McHarek’s reading class. Sana had originally
planned for a quiz but rescheduled her class so that I could see some teaching
take place. First Sana went over the week’s agenda with the class. She reminded
them that there would be a quiz tomorrow and their final exam is on Thursday of
this week. Next Sana informed the class of today’s agenda. She passed out a
reading passage to the class and told them to skim/scan the passage in order to
find the main idea of the text. She reviewed what skimming and scanning were
and how to do them. She gave the students about 1 minute to scan the text. Sana
then called on people to tell her the main idea of the text. Students seemed to
struggle with this and probably needed more time. Sana eventually reviewed the
main idea of the text, so that the whole class knew what the text was
essentially about. This was a good example of schema building. Now the class
knew that the text was about an island called Mona Island.
Sana next allotted 10 minutes for students to read the
passage. The passage was a little long but not very hard in language. The text
was 11 paragraphs with approximately 1000 total words. As the students were reading the passage, Sana
wrote new vocab words on the board. Once the students finished the reading, the
class began to answer the questions about the passage. Sana had implemented an
answering system, where students hold up a side of a notecard that has a letter
on it: A, B, C or D. This way, more advanced students don’t call out the answer
and ruin the chance for slower students to find the answer themselves. I found this method to be very effective and
interactive for the students. After answering a couple questions, Sana then
reviewed the new vocab. She called on people to try and answer the meaning of
the new vocab words. Often she used
pictures to describe harder words, like scuba diving and snorkeling. The
students began to work on another aspect of the worksheet but ran out of time,
so Sana said they would finish it tomorrow. I really enjoyed Sana’s class and
loved her teaching techniques.
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