Erin - CO 2

Yesterday, I attended Maria's elementary reading class. And, just like in the composition class, I was impressed by how much the students understood and the extent to which they could communicate in English. She did not begin her class by taking role, or by greeting students individually (that I could see) because all of the students were there when I arrived, but she did write the agenda on the board for the students to see.
Although the general name of the class is reading, Maria always had a very specific focus for everything that they read. She made it clear at the beginning of class that the topic they would be covering that day was finding the main idea of a passage. She had students take turns reading aloud about what main ideas and controlling ideas were, along with examples. Sometimes, if the last section had taken a while to be read, she would read the next one aloud and ask them to follow along with her. Despite the fact that this is considered in the beginning level, she did not let pronunciation errors slide and would make the student repeat a word until they said it correctly.
Whenever a word or concept was unfamiliar to the students, she would give several examples of it; for example, they did not know what the word synonym meant, so she told them a definition in English, wrote an example on the board, and then asked the students to volunteer other examples, which she also wrote on the board. She also enhanced comprehension and relativity, both by alluding to previous lessons ("This is a 'who' question; remember when we learned about the 5 W's?") and by associating a concept or story with someone the students know and can relate to ("This is from a newspaper...You know so-and-so writes for the newspaper back home, right?").
The students did a timed reading, which was followed by questions. After the allotted time, Maria went over the story with the students, reading it aloud as they followed along, and then they all answered the questions together in order to gauge comprehension. She was very comfortable with her students, and she did not act like she knew all the answers and admitted when she was unsure about something. Although they made a few mistakes, the class seemed to be confident about their reading skills and seemed to understand the majority of all that was said or read.