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Observing and Critiquing a Literacy Lesson

Lua Shanks

Dr. Lucia

06-24-2020

Part II: Observe and Critique a Literacy Lesson

A. Meet with The Teacher

In another lesson I met with the teacher who was handling ten students, the students were five years old. The goals of the experience were about phonological awareness. The lesson was organized as follows:

i. Demonstrating of spoken words and understanding of phonemes

ii. Blending the sounds of single-syllable words to form phonemes

iii. Isolating and pronouncing the phonemes in spoken words

iv. To segment spoken single-syllable words to create a full sequence of individual phonemes

v. Decoding one-syllable words which are recurrently spelled and the irregularly spelled ones

vi. Decoding of two-syllable words by breaking the terms into syllables depending on the patterns.

The task set by the teacher is to have student to be fully phonetically aware of words and sounds. the teachers has set out instructions where the students have been designated different tasks of reading words and sound so that they can differentiate the phonemes and be able to comprehend the word they are reading .the teacher agree that we would meet the following day and conduct the observations (Harste, 1984). .

The copy of the plan given by the teacher show a critically well-established lesson development plan that has every aspect discussed noted down in the lesson plan. All activities are set out in a chorological order that show how easy it will be for the student to perform well in the lesson.

B. Critiquing Lesson Plan

The lesson plan used by the teacher covered 35 minutes, and the lesson was introduced, asking the learners to introduce themselves, meeting with a stranger, and the reception of visitors. The creation of sentences, reading, and writing of words and narration of simple tales by the learners were some of the teacher's strategies and activities. The approach of asking the learners to read out loudly what they have on the card or what has been written on the whiteboard was a good strategy that engaged every learner in class (Cullen, 2001). However, the approach does not build exciting attention to the learner. From the observation, I managed to observe one learner who was struggling to read what was on the word card and was fond of learning after the rest, which implied that the teacher should give more time.

Contrary to the previous observation, the lesson I observed had an allocation of time in the introductory part. In addition, it contained the informal assessments, learner activities, formal assessment, the reflection section, and the extension time. The strategies employed also included the use of songs to enhance the reading of the written words (Harste, 1984). The teacher created the song, and then it was taught to the learners to sing while reading the recorded names as they sing.

The lesson plan had involved all students being fully engaged in the lesson. This was done by having them use other means to be fully aware of the concepts of phonemes and syllables decoding. the teachers ensure that all student were able to see was written in the charts however some of the writing were unreadable therefore limiting children at the back of the class to see. All material used in the lesson was effective and every aspect class attentiveness was achieved. The teachers had all students take turn in singing so as they could be gauged at how much progress they had make. The song was catchy even though it had close to complex syllable illustration in it (Tomlinson et al, 2003).

The informal assessment carried out on the learners involved classification of words depending on the syllable sounds. The classification of these words was aided by the charts, which were hung on the walls by the teacher. The charts contained cut words to enable the learner to read and classify the words accordingly basing on the sound taught by the teacher (Whitehurst, 1992). This practice was made to accommodate all the learners by speaking and pointing at the words by the teacher while instructing the learner. Varying materials, being learner-centered and knowledge- centered is an effective way of differentiating learners' ability (Tomlinson, et al. 2003)

C. Critiquing the Lesson Implementation

The implementation of the lesson showed how successful the teacher was in planning. There was much engagement between the teacher and the students. The lesson revolved around speech, pronunciation of word and identifying phonemes in different words. The results were that the students could be seen very much aware of the phonemes being taught (Tomlinson et al, 2003).

The students were orderly in their engagement as they raised their hands when they want to communicate with the teachers. This showed that the level of commitments in the lesson. However, I observed that there are a couple of student who were not much engaged like the rest of the students. The students I observed that they had difficulty in reading and pronouncing words. the teacher addressed this by focusing most of the lesson on helping them pronounce word by inviting them in to the front of the class and allowing them to read aloud words that they could fully comprehend with any hesitations(Harste, 1984) .

These strategies also worked as it increased their morale and the rest of the student could be seen cheering for this student with the direct involvement of the teachers. Some students had a hard time concentrating therefore having the teacher call out their names periodically to have their attention focused on the lesson.

The ability of the students to learn words and sing some of the phonemes was outstanding. The level of cooperation between the student and the teacher is credited to the liveliness the lessons were as the teacher implanted fun games that had the learners hooked. The recommendation I would give to the teachers is to have all child engage in painting and coloring as this could significantly increases their comprehension of the subject (Weisberg, & Savard, 1993). The teachers could use lees time on the charts and diagrams that showed that many students had difficulty in reading since it is written in small fonts and therefore engaged using big font placards (Tomlinson et al, 2003).

D. Evaluate the Results of The Lesson

The achievement of objectives from the evaluation was average because the activities involved in the literacy development were very many, and they exhausted both the teacher and the learner. The operations, such as decoding of single-syllable words and two-syllable words, were tedious. Therefore, the two activities were supposed to be handled separately to reduce the workload of the learner and the teacher.

The evaluation of the lesson is most mostly average. This is due the bulkiness that was involved in the lesson. The teachers had many activities done in a span of 35 minutes with which was tedious and exhausting for the teachers and the students. The level of engaging was commendable as every student got involved in the process by either answering a question or illustrating how they can decode one word syllables. Moreover, pronounced phonemes (Weisberg, & Savard, 1993).

The overall assessment of the lesson was better than average as all the strategies the teacher use such as singing was very effective to the student’s ability to comprehend word and understand their meaning. All activities could have fully worked if it had been spaced into two lessons however the informal assessment showed that student could differentiate pronunciations of words and syllable based on their sounds (Whitehurst, 1992). . Conduct has shown that learns in had b phonetic awareness and most of the goal of the lesson had been fulfilled.

References

Cullen, R. (2001). The use of lesson transcripts for developing teachers' classroom language. System, 29(1), 27-43.

Harste, J. C. (1984). Language stories & literacy lessons. Heinemann Educational Books Inc., 70 Court St., Portsmouth, NH 03801.

Tomlinson, C.A., Brighton, C., Hertberg, H., Callahan, C.M., Moon, T.R., et al (2003) differentiating instruction in response to student readiness, interest, and learning profile in academically diverse classrooms: A Review of Literature. Journal for the Education of the Gifted. 27.2/3, 119-145

Weisberg, P., & Savard, C. F. (1993). Teaching preschoolers to read: Don't stop between the sounds when segmenting words. Education and treatment of children, 1-18.

Whitehurst, G. J. (1992). Dialogic reading: An effective way to read to preschoolers. Reading Rockets. http://www. readingrockets. org/article/dialogic-reading-effective-way-read-preschoolers.