Week Four: Noticing

     The past four weeks in my third grade classroom at Walsh elementary, I have been getting to know my students academically as well as personally. Not only is it important to understand your students in an academic sense, but I believe it is very important to understand your students personally. Relationships between students and teachers are very important, and can help students blossom if they know they have encouragement and support from their teacher. Over the past few weeks in my classroom, among co-teaching and supporting other students in the room, I have been extensively working with one student in particular. After my mentor teacher and I performed the Fountas and Pinnell assessment, this particular student was assigned a reading level A ( working on basic reading behavior). However, during math lessons, he seems to understand numbers and passes the lessons with ease and excitement. In conversation with him after a math lesson, I said (in Spanish), "Sam (pseudonym), do you like math?" He replied to me in Spanish and said, "I love math, it's so easy!" I said, "I can tell you really like what you're math and can tell you really know how to use the addition math strategies we've been working on."

     While this observation is not surprising for many teachers, where their student is exceptional at one subject and struggles with another, I found it particularly interesting because he was excited that a teacher finally noticed and praised him for what he can do. Today, during our math lesson, I continuously thanked him for his thoughtful answers and mathematic strategies, and had him explain his work to other students in his group. While we were individual reading today, I said, "Sam, let's get books we can read together! We read together just you and me." Giving this student one-on-one attention with books that have repetition and basic site words boosted his confidence, and hopefully it will encourage him to not place anxiety and stress on the subject of literacy; rather it will push him to make himself a stronger reader with teacher support. During our reading time, we talked about the pictures in Spanish. This also helped him to communicate with me about what he was noticing in the text. I'm very excited to see him (as well as my other students) grow as learners throughout the year. It's wonderful to see how praise and encouragement for students can boost self esteem and learning confidence. I'm looking forward to creating a positive learning environment in my classroom this year.