Reflection:
Connections Essay 2
Templeton chapter 5 talks a lot about English Language learners inside the classroom. My placement at Hazelwood has 6 ELL students in my Kindergarten classroom however all of these students speak English in the classroom and their native language at home. Most of our students in the ELL program are in what Templeton called “Level 4: Intermediate. Students’ receptive vocabulary is quite large and they use more verb tenses appropriately. However, general academic and domain-specific academic vocabulary are still limited.” (164, Templeton, October 30, 2018). We know this by listening to our students oral conversation during playtime versus what they write in their journals. The ELL students are able to communicate and be understood by not only the adults in the room but also with their peers. Though when we exam the journal entries from each day our ELL students have had a harder type placing a corresponding letter to the number of sounds that they here in each word.
Another thing that Templeton mentions in Chapter 5 that I saw in my placement was the table of developmental stages and English learners for reading, writing, and word study on page 166. At the beginning of the year, my CT encouraged our students to pretend write. We practiced as a class writing any way we could in our journals whether that be with scribble writing, magic line writing, or writing any letter we know how to write. These strategies of emergent writing help encourage the students to be independent and confident in their own skill level. As of this past month we have been dialing in on having the students write a letter that matches the sound that they hear within the words they are trying to write.
In our first grade classroom this week with our buddies, Mandi and I’s buddy was in what Templeton calls the sound pattern speller level in chapter 8. When looking at our buddy’s writing she spelled "from" like “fum” and also “pour” like “poor.” However she has been able to pick up the word pattern of treat with the spelling of “ea” in the middle of the word. As Mandi and I continued to work with editing and finding the silent “e's" with our buddy it became noticeable that our buddy was becoming frustrated with all the editing that she was having to do on her how to stories as she slowly became more silent as the editing went on and she also at one point put her story away when we asked her what word she was trying to write for she had wrote “ERye.” After that I did have our buddy retake out her story and said “I know you are frustrated and that editing is hard but we got to push through this because it will help us become a better writer and all good writers edit.” I don't know if I did the right thing but we did manage to get her to finish the last sentence before putting the paper back away again.
Lastly we went to the fifth grade classroom where Mandi and I’s fifth grade buddy was about to dive into a non-fiction book about Lewis and Clark. The fifth grade teacher had established that she would like the students to first look at those books to “make meaningful connections to other texts, their lives, or the world” (287, Templeton, November 3, 3018) for them to think deeply about what might be about to happen in the book. Our buddy looked at the pictures and said that it would be about Indians and Lewis and Clark. Then we moved on to talk a little about the book she was currently reading during her independent reading time before we went back to exam Lewis and Clark more carefully by taking a look at all the pictures in the book. She used literal words when she described each picture as we went though the book. In regards to what Templeton talks about in chapter eight, I would say that our fifth grade buddy is in the middle transitional readers stage.