Week 7 Assignment 1 kindergarten

The kindergarten teachers incorporated all parts of language development in their whole group lesson.  They had speaking, listening, reading, viewing, and writing.  Even though the students were not individually writing, they were working as a group to fill in missing words in a story in Mr. Sinnett’s class.  In Ms. Owens class, one student was writing his sentence using a pointer will the rest of the class read his sentence as he pointed it out using the word wall words.  In both classrooms, students were speaking, listening and reading.  They used the word wall as a resource to get high frequency words into writing. 

 

The primary focus of both classroom lessons was word identification; however it was approached in different ways.  Ms. Owens used word identification in creating new sentences personalized by the student.  The student pointing at the words on the word wall did not read his sentence to the class, but the class read his sentence out loud as he pointed.  In Mr. Sinnet’s class the seconds created sentences by identifying missing words from the sentence.  This class also used phonological awareness with the word “good”.  They used the word wall and prior knowledge to help them identify the missing words.  Both classrooms used sight words and prior knowledge to build developing the parts of language.

 

Both teachers had students reading aloud words or sentences developing the phonological awareness and the letter and word recognition.  Each of the activities meet students’ individual needs, and allowed students to experiment with language, by providing opportunities to uses prior knowledge and ideas to develop sentences.

Each teacher had specific goals and outcomes for the direct lesson of using the word wall words and high frequency words to build sentences.  Ms. Owens stated that she specifically placed words on the word wall that the student was having difficulty with in written text.  When the student in Ms. Owen’s class had to start his sentence over because he realized it did not make sense when he inserted the word “like,” Ms. Owens took that opportunity to teach a strategy.  She told the students it was okay to start your writing over again when you get stuck or make a mistake, opportunistic instruction

 

Mr. Sinnet has specific words and letters (using sound recognition) that will need to be placed in the sentences to complete the letter he has written to his students.  When the first student suggested for the word “to” to be placed in the sentence, Mr. Sinnet took the opportunity to check for reasonableness.  He read the sentence to the students with the word “to” and the students immediately recognized “to” did not work and the word needed to be changed to “is.”