Discovery

V. Methodology
B. Elaboration of significant episode:
Each morning during our morning work out students to Tucker signing, word work with spelling or vocab and learn 3 word wall words. Today we did everything at a fast pace. We signed fast and quickly basketball clapped our work wall words. We did a word sort for our spelling words. We sorted into two piles, long I and long o. The students worked very well as a group and sorted well. I think the fast pace really helped the students wake up. Usually they struggle keeping their eyes open and heads of the desk.

Today during reading I let the students have a discovery lesson. They had to figure out what the 2 vocabulary patterns were. I didn't give them much direction, I just stepped back to see what they knew. The small group worked together very well and came up with a lot of different ideas, some of which I had not even thought of. They tried out different solutions and would quickly figure out themselves that their pattern wasn't correct. Finally after finding some small patterns, they found the "book" pattern, which correlates with our spelling pattern (with long i and o). I praised them for their good discoveries and we talked about each one. At the end we discussed the patterns of cvcv and cvvc. The students were very engaged during the session.

During writing we also had another step by step discovery lesson on the computers. The computer teacher came in to guide students through using the laptops. Teaching them how to log in, find Word, save their work in the shared drives, and get them started typing a paragraph. One of my students, who is off his meds, was having a terrible time concentrating. It took all three of us teachers to get him to type the title. He would look at the title on the paper, then forget what he was typing by the time he looked at the screen. I finally went over to help him one on one because he needed someone there or else he would get nothing accomplished. I got him an blue ez reader and put it on the correct line on the paper copy of what he was typing. That helped him keep his place a bit better. I almost had to read each letter, space, comma, etc to him or else he would just totally forget what he was doing or would get distracted by something else. Needless to say we didn’t get much done on the paragraph.

C. Analysis of Episode:
I was excited that the fast pace almost seemed to help motivate students. One even commented, “Man we got a workout this morning.” Their word sort seemed to keep the variety alive and well in the group. I was afraid we would leave some students behind, but they actually all seemed to stay right with me; Kind of a fun pace for today.

During reading I was also very excited with how well the student did with their brainstorms to find the patterns in the words. The students even came up with some patterns I didn’t know. They all worked so well together and seemed excited when other students came up with new patterns. It was so good for these students to figure things out for themselves. Sometimes it is easy just to tell student the information. I am glad that this mini-discovery lesson went well!

Today my heart broke when I was working with my distracted student. I am not a huge proponent of medicine, but he could just not focus at all. Each day recently something has distracted him. Today during reading the squeak of my marker on the sentence strips was driving him crazy; he couldn’t even focus on his work. Yesterday he was mesmerized by my orange pen. He followed every move it took, but couldn’t focus at all on his spelling work. I finally let him write with it because then at least he would get his work done. On Friday he was distracted for a long time with his work. I kept asking him if he needed help and tried to refocus him. Finally he sighed and asked, “What is that pocket for?” My shirt has a small pocket on the sleeve and that is all he could look at. Nothing else would keep his attention because he was pondering the use of that little pocket. This student is very bright and would definitely be able to be mainstreamed if he had some medicine to help him focus. He does very well in reading, writing, and math if you can just get him to look at the board, his paper, or to listen long enough to understand the lesson. Lately while he is sitting at his desk we let him use a cd player with calm music and headphones to help him from hearing so many distractions. It seems to keep his focus at his desk, but I’m not sure it helps him focus on the words any more. I guess I’ll have to keep brainstorming with other ideas to help him keep focused.

Heartbreak of the Day:
I just now saw the news and 11 children with special needs were living in a foster home. The foster parents made the students live in cages. The foster parents were home schooling the kids also. One of the cages had a wire fence across the opening. The news said that it looked as if one child had tried to escape, so the fencing was used to keep him in. The cages looked almost like doghouses and didn’t even have a mattress in them. My heart breaks for these children. They mentioned some of them were Autistic. I can’t imagine what was going through their precious little minds. I sometimes just have to cry for all these little ones that have to face so much. Each day I have to thank God for my caring and nurturing upbringing. At least I have the opportunity to show love to my students everyday.

”It's what you do with what is given to you”