Katie- CO 1

Tuesday morning I did my first classroom observation in an advanced elementary reading class, taught by Ms. Ah-Young Kim. Ms. Kim did her best to use the students’ names, though she still appeared to be learning them, and she kept a nice, steady pace throughout class. The atmosphere was pretty relaxed as they went over vocabulary words, took their quiz, and went over the answers together. Some students were more eager than others, so Ms. Kim did well to keep control by allowing students to call out answers during review, but to go around the room to every student when checking the quiz. After the quiz, Ms. Kim led the students through the final passage of a children’s fairytale they were reading, Snow White. The reading was fairly easy for the students to read, and many of the stories in the book she used are familiar to them. English was spoken the entire time, error correction was definitely taking place, and while Ms. Kim did most of the reading out loud for the passage, it still felt student centered as the class discussed blacked out words and why they were used over other words in their vocabulary. Class appeared to pass pretty quickly, and at the end Ms. Kim had me read their new vocabulary words out for the class before calling it a day. I liked the way Ms. Kim held her class, speaking casually with her students without losing her authoritative role. I also thought it was nice to praise the students for doing better overall on this quiz than the previous, and to recognize the student with the highest grade. It was a pretty typical language class, but I still feel like it was helpful to look at the class from an outsiders’ perspective as opposed to my usual student view point.