I honestly never thought that I would learn so much from one project. With so much that is being crammed into one school day I found it hard to pull Margarita out because not only was there not a lot of time but also because I didn’t want her to miss something else during the process. A lot of the time that I found to work with her was during morning work or also reading centers because it was essentially the same concept just in a different format. Being in a school where there is such a large minority population it is 100% clear that you should just teach every student the way you would teach an ELL. Not only would you then have to not find time to pull the student out but all of the students in the classroom would benefit from the more visual/active learning.
Although I didn’t get to work with Margarita as much as I wanted to I felt as though she made some good gains. Her fluency is something that I think that as long as she slows down on she will read much more meaningful and she will understand when she is reading because I think she tries to rush things and that makes her miss words and also throw in random words that don’t belong. I think Margarita would benefit from more grammar practice. When she is taking her weekly test she is passing them so I think that it is just a matter of her seeing new things, which will help her when speaking. The vocabulary book helped her a lot and I think that once I have my own classroom I will do something along those lines. Pronunciation is also something that should still be worked on and that can be as simple as correcting her words when she is talking and making her repeat them until she is able to say it correctly. I think Margarita benefited from the graphic organizer in the comprehension section and even though it is something that it on the wall in the classroom I think that if she would complete it before writing she would be much more successful when it comes to summarizing.
Margarita has also taught me a lot. Since she struggles with a lot of different areas I noticed that she needed to have a little bit of extra time to do things, so I found that I needed to be patient with her. If you gave her the time that she needed she usually got it done. On the other hand she also taught me to not give her too much time because she will take advantage of it. Sometimes you just need to find a happy medium when working with all students and their happy mediums might not all be the same.
One of the biggest things I realized is that you have to make learning fun for the students. You can worksheet students to death but in the end they aren’t going to remember it because it wasn’t something that they enjoyed. Take for instance the fluency game that we played; I don’t think that I have ever seen such a big smile on her face.
Being in this classroom has taught me so much about working with and teaching ELL students. I believe that I have learned to be a more explicit teacher and have learned to go into more detail than I have in the past, which is something that is going to help me moving forward in my teaching career.
Although I didn’t get to work with Margarita as much as I wanted to I felt as though she made some good gains. Her fluency is something that I think that as long as she slows down on she will read much more meaningful and she will understand when she is reading because I think she tries to rush things and that makes her miss words and also throw in random words that don’t belong. I think Margarita would benefit from more grammar practice. When she is taking her weekly test she is passing them so I think that it is just a matter of her seeing new things, which will help her when speaking. The vocabulary book helped her a lot and I think that once I have my own classroom I will do something along those lines. Pronunciation is also something that should still be worked on and that can be as simple as correcting her words when she is talking and making her repeat them until she is able to say it correctly. I think Margarita benefited from the graphic organizer in the comprehension section and even though it is something that it on the wall in the classroom I think that if she would complete it before writing she would be much more successful when it comes to summarizing.
Margarita has also taught me a lot. Since she struggles with a lot of different areas I noticed that she needed to have a little bit of extra time to do things, so I found that I needed to be patient with her. If you gave her the time that she needed she usually got it done. On the other hand she also taught me to not give her too much time because she will take advantage of it. Sometimes you just need to find a happy medium when working with all students and their happy mediums might not all be the same.
One of the biggest things I realized is that you have to make learning fun for the students. You can worksheet students to death but in the end they aren’t going to remember it because it wasn’t something that they enjoyed. Take for instance the fluency game that we played; I don’t think that I have ever seen such a big smile on her face.
Being in this classroom has taught me so much about working with and teaching ELL students. I believe that I have learned to be a more explicit teacher and have learned to go into more detail than I have in the past, which is something that is going to help me moving forward in my teaching career.