Week 2

On my second day, I was quite confident as I knew the students now. It was a lot better as compared to last time. In my last two visits, I felt that the class lack behind in English in knowledge, skills and understanding about English language and literature and the ability to talk, listen, read, view and write with purpose, effect and confidence. They are actually in early stage 3 but still doing late stage 2 and some even in early stage 2. This is because they are from diverse backgrounds with English as their second or even third language. Their parents speak a different language at home and are not literate. They work well in two strands i.e. talking and listening as they do this at every moment in class but they need help with other two strands (reading and writing). Support teachers come in daily to provide extra support in reading groups. They can integrate a range of skills and strategies efficiently when reading and interpreting texts and visual images. They explore the structure and grammatical features for a range of written and visual texts. Students try to write literary and factual texts in terms of topic, purpose, audience and language by drafting, revising and proofreading using PEGS (Punctuation, Effort, Grammar, and Spelling) displayed in front of the class. They use accurate sentence structure, grammatical features and punctuation conventions to produce various texts and spell familiar and unfamiliar words using knowledge of letter-sound correspondence, common letter patterns and a range of other strategies.

On the contrary, most of the students can use four operations. But some might have a few problems in division. I have seen them working with fractions in the number strand and found that they can model, compare and represent simple fractions and recognize percentages in everyday situations and they model, compare, represent, add and subtract decimals to two decimal places. They are doing late stage 2 mathematics and I believe that can handle it confidently. This might be because they have more chance of hands on experience in mathematics rather than English.

Mrs. Adrienne (my cooperating teacher) uses a lot of choice in her class instead of using a lot of materialistic rewards. Her idea behind the choice is that it is up to the students to sort out their behaviour and it puts decision in their hands to be good or bad (Jane, Lectures). This strategy really works well with troublesome kids. Mrs. Adrienne uses a lot of direct instruction in class to guide students which is an effective teaching strategy as the teacher monitors students' activities and learning (Jane, lectures).

Reference:
Tanti, M. (2009). Effective Teaching and Professional Practice. North Sydney: Australian Catholic University Ltd.