Observing Arlene

There were some pieces of Arlene's work in English as an Additional Language that seemed similar to Micah's work as speech and language therapist. They both corrected the child they were working with immediately after making a small mistake, particularly regarding pronunciation. Today when Eddie, the fourth grade child Arlene works with one on one, said, for example, "It says, it's self-CAT-ring," Arlene corrected him immediately, by simply correctly pronouncing the word "catering." She interjected the word forcefully, and this was often accompanied with her pointing to the word he was reading. In the same way, Eddie asked, "Why would they ask it to the travel agent?" which Arlene quick repeated and then rephrased as: "Why would they ask the travel agent this?" She then engaged in conversation with him about why he though someone would ask a travel agent to stop cows from looking through the window at them.


Both Micah and Arlene correct the children they work with, but often do with in away that allows the student to come to an answer on his or her own.  “Now think for a minute, Eddie," Arlene said today, "You said they were ‘attacked.’ They were…” This allowed Eddie to look to the text and produce the answer on his own: “They were attracted,” he said.


Another similarity between the two teacher's work with a child is the way they ask prompting questions. At one point, Arlene allowed Eddie to think for a while about the answer to a true/false statement and make guesses without help. She prompted him after minutes by pointing him to an important part of the reading, saying, “It says ‘an initial’ complaint. What does that mean?” In a different instance, Eddie came up with an answer, which was incorrect, so Arlene said, "I don't agree. Why don't I agree?"She waited for him to think and search through the text for the answer. She prompted him again, "He does suggest ABTA, what else does he suggest?” In the vocabulary section, Arlene said, after allowing Eddie to read the question, “What word do you think means ‘large quantity’?” “Abroad?” Eddie guess. She told him no, proceeded to explain what abroad means, and then asked, “And also, would ‘large quantity’ fit there?” She had Eddie go back to the sentence in the reading, and they read through it together. “Yes, deluge, deluge means large quantity. Usually, as it says on there, deluge means a large quantity of water,” she concluded, helping him to reach the answer through questions.


Arlene often provided the definition for Eddie's misused words. In conversation, she even defined a word as they casually spoke in order to help him: “It’s a permanent exhibition, so it’s always there.” Micah also fostered normal conversations with her students interspersed between formal work, so that if a child had a pressing story to share that was connected to the activity, just like Eddie's story about hurricanes (since the reading on travel agents mentioned hurricanes), they are encouraged to share it. In the same way that Arlene defined a word in their conversation to make it relevant to his EAL practice, Micah would correct children's speech while they had a casual conversation.


After the session, Arlene and I spoke and debriefed. She told me how speech is the first thing that comes in learning a new language, so that is not typically what she has to work on. I noticed that Eddie used the word "like" in conversation, just like an American kid would speaking English with his friends. She said that they pick of spoken language through conversations with friends, and I realized his use of the word "like" made sense. 


Arlene emphasized how the children are not missing out anything in class, because they are typically pulled out to do the exact same thing that would otherwise happen in class. Therefore, the EAL environment allows them to learn it more thoroughly, at the level and speed that they need with an individual focus for them. We talked about how EAL is not a punishment; it is an advantage. We talked about the debate of if Eddie should continue EAL in fifth grade, and it seems much of what she said pointed to the fact that EAL is working towards building a foundation for children so they can learn more easily in future. 
 

Learning in Minutes

Watching kids who have learned how to work something out on his or her own is refreshing. Christine was reciting each number in order from one to one hundred as part of her assessment. She got to the number sixteen, and something had distracted her. She sat there, not knowing what to do, when she got an idea. She started back at one and counted all the way through to fifteen. Then she could produce the number sixteen easily. She kept going to seventeen. I praised her, very impressed that she had worked out a strategy on her own. "That was a very good technique," I told her, something I say to the girl I tutor, Sarah, when she remembers to use a strategy I taught her for her homework assignment.

It is equally as refreshing watching a child learn quickly after being shown what to do. Arthur was writing capital and lower case Y's. "Can you show me that again?" I asked him, as I had seen him make three Y's in three different ways. "I don't really know the right way to do it," he admitted. "That's okay! I'll show you how I make my Y's," I encouraged him. I talked him through each step as I did it, using the class terminology: sky line, plane line, grass line, worm line. All I had to do was show him once, as he watched carefully, and he was writing uppercase Y's correctly. When he began lowercase Y's, he was having the same difficulty, and so I slowly showed him how I wrote mine, talking him through it the whole time. He wrote each line for the way in the correct order and correct direction, but he started a line above. I asked him, "Which line do you start on? The sky line or the plane line?" He answered, "the sky line," and so I asked him to look at the lowercase Y I demonstrated. "Oh, the plane line," he corrected and promptly erased his Y's and started making lines that start at the plane line.

Although it is remarkable to watch children grow and learn over the course of the year, as I discussed in my first blog post, it is equally remarkable to watch a child learn in just a matter of minutes. It is incredible to think how days prior, Christine may not have known what to do had she forgotten what number came after fifteen, and just five minutes prior, Arthur was writing Y's in the wrong order and from the incorrect lines. Whether it is self-taught or absorbed from a teacher's demonstration, children are capable of learning in minutes.

Slow Working and Stimulation Seeking

I'm thinking about Thayer today. In the classroom this morning, he had trouble with the clapping exercise. Most others were able to pick up on the patterns easily. A few others were a bit slow to catch on, but caught up relatively quickly. Thayer, on the other hand, started grabbing his face, something I have noticed he does when he is nervous. He say every other children clapping and slapping their thighs in rhythm along with the pattern, and it overwhelmed him. He put his hands over his ears and screamed.

Angelle spoke to him calmly and asked the entire class to slow down. She spoke to Thayer about what they were doing: "Clap clap, pat pat. It's an AA BB pattern." He attempted to catch up, to follow the pattern. He had a look of concentration. He was trying very hard. He started flailing and grew discouraged.

This has happened before that I've witnessed: that he's has not be able to do something others could. At morning meeting last week, I believe, the class was writing numbers on individual paddle white boards. He tried, first of all, to think of the answer to Angelle's math problem. I have seen Thayer accomplish mountainous, impressive problems when he is focused, so I knew if he stopped and thought it through, he would reach the answer. He became very aware that he was further behind than his classmates. Angelle had moved on to another problem, and the questions were getting backlogged. I came over to him and slowed him down. Have learning issues, I occasionally get overwhelmed when the teacher moves on before I am reading, before I've grasped the first piece. It makes me want to just scream, "Slow down!" but I see I am the only one struggling. Like me, if Thayer was given enough time to think through the problems, he could find the answers. He needed to focus on getting his twos and fives the correct way, and he was putting the number four before the one in the number fourteen. I sat with him and had him write the numbers a second time, so the answers were correct, and then we would move on to the next question. This occurence made me wonder if Thayer has learning issues, which I would only be able to recognize because I have similar disabilities and am surrounded by SLD students daily. (However, I acknowledge this is by no means a diagnosis, and there are real professionals who know what they are talking about much more than I do.) I figured, perhaps, that same could be done with this clapping exercise. However, even when giving more time to work slowly, he was not able to get it.

I was happy to sit in on a conversation between Angelle and Tara about what type of learner he is and what might work for him. He is a very smart child once focused. However, he also has some sort of sensory problems. He has begun OT. Angelle described him as "stimulation seeking," saying that there are three sensory issues a child could have: understimulation, overstimulation, and stimulation seeking.

I saw this to be true when I followed the class to Music. I he first started pulling at his cheeks, something I've witnessed him doing before, and something Tara identified in our conversation. I sat next to him and noticed he was snapping a rubber band onto his wrist repeatedly. I spot to him about this, asked him why he was doing it, and told him to stop. He continued a minute later, so I took the rubber band away from him. Later, he then started punching himself in his cheeks with a closed fist, something Tara mentioned he was caught doing in an after school program one day. He is clearly seeking stimulation, but why? Angelle described it as a coping mechanism, but coping for what? Is it related to his slow work speed (and possible learning disabilities)? Perhaps I need to ask Mel, the OT specialist, a few questions...

Growing

I have been observing and helping in Angelle's kindergarten classroom since the beginning of the school year. One thing that hit me in about January was how much they had grown.

They can recognize words they were not able to before. Watching Christine during her student-led parent conference, she was able to read and recognize nearly every single word written on the schedule of the day. They have become familiarized over the course of the school year, as we all read them in a sing-songy voice daily each morning: "Babadaba! Schedule of the Day".

They are much more independent. I think back to one of my first sessions in the classroom with them. They were doing an activity on small, individual-size white boards, which involved them having to spray and erase after producing each answer. All the boys and many of the girls would look to me, unsure of what to do or where the erasing spray was. I put it down in the same spot on the table each time, which Teagan and a few other girls seemed to realize, but no other students did. Some would ask me where the spray was or how to clean it, while in some cases, it did not seem to occur to those kids how to achieve their white board getting clean. Now, I see children acting in a variety of ways that show their independence and initiative. All the kids now stand up and get the _____ word chart on their own. They are able to recognize that they are trying to spell a common word that appears on the chart, and without any instruction from a teacher or a question to a teacher, they get the chart by themselves - and spot the word without help, as well.

Although, throughout the year boys have increasingly needed sticker charts of marbles to make sure they behave or contribute in class, these boys have also increasingly gained more stickers more often. They have more good days in which Thayer does not speak out of turn and gets right to work and more days when Sam speaks up in class, sharing his voice.

Almost all twos are written forwards, rather than backwards, now. Children are ditching capital letters and learning to use them only with proper nouns and not in every instance. People are starting from the sky line to form their letters without being told. They can add numbers and notice patterns.

It was been an unmatched experience watching these children grow over the course of a year. It has been really inspiring to see that they can learn so much from such wonderful teachers.