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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.

B. Critiquing Lesson Plan

The lesson plan used by the teacher covered 35 minutes, and the lesson was introduced, asking the learner 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. Also, 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. The teacher created the song, and then it was taught to the learners to sing while reading through the recorded names as they sing.

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. 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

Concerning the implementation of the lesson, the response suggested a success. Most of the students responded to the teacher’s instructions by speaking when called upon and raising of hands. However, I was able to note some two students who never responded as expected, like the rest of the learners, and seemed to be out of the lesson. After the teacher checked on the two students, one of the students had a particular need, and it required the teacher to be close to him while calling the name regularly to keep the learner engaged. Besides everything, most of the learners were impressed as most could form the phonemes' vocabulary, sing, and create simple sentences. The teacher was only recommended to have a variety of tasks inclusive of all learners, including drawing, pictures singing, and painting with the use of crayons to help the learners identify more colors.

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.

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