Communication in my classroom-Meghan

I'm currently in a second grade classroom that is mainly comprised of African American children, there are a few Latino children and a few Caucasian children as well. When I entered the classroom the students were engaged in a math lesson. My teacher introduced me to the class and immediately sat me down next to a student and asked me to, "keep him focused on the activity". They had completed a daily math activity and were going over the answers together. I came in right at the end and observed the teacher getting the students answers to the last question. She wrote all of their answers on the board and in the end they went over what they thought to be the correct answer. I was very impressed that the teacher had little to do with the lesson and allowed the students to explain their reasoning behind their answers and in the end they came up with the answer to the question as a whole.  They did a few more math activities and then switched over to their English lesson for the day. 

Again, the teacher asked me to sit with the student and to keep him "on task". He seemed to be engaged in the activities, but once in a while he would start to look out the door or fiddle with something on his desk and I would have to remind him to pay attention. The teacher did a great job of making sure that the students were on the same page as she was. If her back was turned to the class while she was writing on the board she would ask the student I was sitting with, "[child's name] are you with me?" to which he would respond "yes", or "yes Mrs. Petersen". The children were practicing phonograms by writing a letter on a piece of paper and then saying the sounds that correspond with that particular letter. For example, Mrs. Petersen wrote the letter "a" on the board and the children copied it on to a piece of paper and then said as a class "ay, eh, and ah". They did this for all of the letters in the alphabet; the students really seemed to know what they were doing. Some students raised their hands and gave words the used the different sounds for each letter. After this lesson I was able to talk with the teacher for about five minutes. She let me know that she used Spalding's method of phonograms to teach the English language to the students and that they have already shown vast improvement. She also let me know that the student that she sat me down with had been struggling with paying attention during class and staying on task. He was in the special education classroom last year, but they moved him out of it this year, and so far he is doing well. This student obviously needs some sort of academic scaffolding to help him succeed in the classroom. From what I have seen it seems that the teacher is providing encouraging words and trying to keep the student on task. She really seems to know how to work with this student to make sure that he is comfortable and on the same level as his classmates. 

The students also had a vocabulary lesson and then moved on to reading. The teacher had the students read along to a book that was on CD after they finished reading the teacher asked the students questions about the text in the reading. She said go to page 36 and to tell her what they see that is different about the text. One student raised their hand and mentioned something about the picture, to which the teacher responded that had to do with the illustration; she would like to know about the text. A few students mention punctuation and then one student mentioned that a word looked like it was written sloppy. The teacher asked the students what they thought it meant and none of them really knew, she then told them that it was in italics and then asked if anyone knew what that meant. She discussed this for a little while with the students and then began to ask them questions that dealt with the themes of the story. They talked about friendship and being a "good" or "loyal" friend and then related that to the story. The students did the majority of the talking and they were mainly talking to one another rather than the teacher. In our class last week we talked about the difference between a discussion and recitation and I believe the students were involved in a discussion because the teacher was not quizzing what the students remember about the story, but she was asking questions that related to the stories theme and that involved the "students' interests" and allowed them to, "share their own personal experiences and knowledge" (Triplett p.68). The teacher seems to know how to use a sort of motivational scaffolding to get the children interested and to keep them on task. She tries to relate to the students by having them share their own personal experiences to learn about the lesson. I am very interested to see if my CT always uses discussion when teaching a lesson to her children or if she sometimes has a recitation type lesson planned.