Today was a pretty interesting day - I got to start by testing some of the students on their letter and number recognition, their knowledge of letter sounds, and their ability to recognize high frequency words. The students who I assessed were ones that had previously scored low, and they were being tested again since we are now officially half way through the school year. Wow...time went so fast! But I love doing things like this with them, where I can see how much they've progressed. My focus student, Andrea, went from being so shy and insecure to being able to correctly identify all letters and their sounds, numbers, and high frequency words.
A lot of the kids in that group are the ELD students, and it was interesting to observe their improvements and how they were similar. When learning letters and their sounds in room three, we have a Letter of the Week that corresponds with an animal and a motion to help remember the letter. For example, "s" is Sammy Snake, and you slither your hand like a snake while making a "sssss" sound. The ELD children seemed to rely more heavily on the motions and animal names when remembering letters during the assessment. The native English speakers did it on a couple of the more difficult letters, or I did the motion and said the animal to help remind them, but all ELD students did the motions and named the animals on at least 75% of their letters. It's interesting how the visuals can be such a trigger for their memories and allow them to better grasp a concept.
During Reading Workshop today, I got to read a book to the group of students as they followed along, instructed to look for high frequency words while listening ("a," "the," "have," "like," etc.). The book was called Library Mouse, and it was about a little mouse named Sam that lived in the library, but only came out at night when their were no humans around to see him. When he did come out he would read and read and get lost in the worlds of books. Eventually, he decided he wanted to write his own book, so he did and he put it in the bookshelf for the children to find in the morning. He did this three times before the librarian left him a note, asking if they could have a Meet the Author day, since no one knew who he was. Instead of allowing the students to meet him (he was too nervous!), he created a "Meet the Author" box with a mirror in it, so each child would look in and see their own face. He also made a bunch of blank books and left sharpened pencils to encourage each student to write their own story. All the students began to write and filled up a whole shelf in the library with stories they had written about things they knew.
I followed this up with a chance for the students to go through the book and find which page was their favorite page in the book and explain why it was their favorite. I got a variety of responses from, "Because Sam just looks so cute and chubby!" to "I just really like how the author illustrated this page and showed everything that was going on," and "Because all the children got to write their own book just like Sam!" We then talked about if they would like to write a book someday, and what they would write about; most of them chose something that they are really interested in right now (fairy tales, horses, volcanoes, science, ghost stories).
I absolutely love getting to read to them. I think the power of listening to a book being read to you incomparable; I still get completely enthralled and will tune out everything except the story if I hear someone reading something out loud.
This was a perfect book for today because, after weeks of waiting and proving that they were responsible enough, Room 3 students got to borrow their first book from the school library. They were so excited to get to look at their books that Mrs. B had to set aside time later in the afternoon with the promise that they would get some quiet time to spend with their book of choice. :)
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