Mitchell CO#2

This morning, I observed a reading class with Professor Stringer There are many things I liked about this class. Firstly, at the onset of the class, her “hook” was passing out an article from the CIES Nole News, which I think is great because it offers intrinsic motivation (as it was an article about things to do on spring break) so it is inherently interesting for the students to read. Secondly, she did a timed reading exercise, which was focused around an article about the history of bikes. In order to boost interest, she showed a quick 2 second video of old style bicycles and people riding them, to introduce the topic of the reading. The students definitely seemed more interested in participating after the video. Lastly, the thing I thought was very useful was the students reading “tracker” table, which allows students to log in how much time each reading takes, and logs their accuracy, and they will be doing several of these readings over the course of the class, so at the end they will see their own progress. This is a great example of intrinsic motivation, and students will likely be more motivated seeing their own reading times go down. Finally, I liked how the teacher took out words from the readings (today she took out words that incorporated the “gh” and how it is pronounced in different situations, such as “ghost,” “rough” and “night.” In all these examples the students had already seen these words in the text. I was actually paired with one of the students in class and helped him go through the phonics activity. I ran into a bump, when the student, Juan, asked me why the word “ghetto” is pronounced gh-eh-tto I did not have an answer for him, to which he remembered, oh yes, the e is pronounced –eh before double “t.” This made me realize how much I have to learn in order to explain things. All in all, this class observation was a great experience and I learned a great deal from Professor Stringer.