Observation 30/03/17
Today I watched Hitha doing reading recovery with one of my lower students, Prinze, reading at Level 2.
Prinze started off by reading a seen text - ‘My Little Cat’ while Hitha did a running record.
She then got him to read a new text - ‘Big and Little’ - which contained that familiar word - little. I noticed the way Hitha was careful to introduce new vocabulary like the word ‘foal.’
When Prinze came to a word he was unsure of, ‘kitten,’ Hitha covered up most of the word so Prinze could only see ‘it.’ She then added the ‘k’ sound. I have been trying to do this more with my reading groups and have noticed children in the higher group pointing out words within words.
Prinze then went to the whiteboard and sorted the magnetic letters for the letters he had been working on - g, o, a, b. He read the letters and said their sounds - he got confused between the b and d so Hitha got him to practise writing upper-case and lower-case bs.
Prinze then made and broke the word ‘go’ and Hitha asked him how we could make that into the word ‘going.’ She got Prinze to write the word with the whiteboard marker and pointed out to me that Prinze has a habit of writing letters from bottom to top - this made me think I need to reinforce letter formation more in class - we do our ‘always start your letters from the top’ song but perhaps I need to make this clearer.
They then went on to a familiar story - “My Little Cat” and Prinze chose a picture from the story to write about. Hitha got him to say his sentence slowly before writing it - “My little cat is in the bag.” getting Prinze to hold the idea in his head for long enough to write it down. When Prinze left too much space between words Hitha covered up his errors with stickers and got him to do it again.
Prinze practised the word ‘bag’ by putting the letters into a sound box and then had a quick practice of some high frequency words - ‘little’ ‘is’ ‘it’ ‘if.’
Hitha then introduced a new book - ‘The skier.’ She said ‘have you ever seen a movie where people go skiing? Before you go skiing you need all your gear.” This book had the word ‘going’ so linked back to the word Prinze had been practising.
Takeaway: I found it really helpful to watch the way Hitha introduced new texts and to hear what she had noticed about Prinze’s handwriting. The way she made connections between words that Prinze had been learning and his books was valuable and made me think about how I could make more links between the sight word songs that we do in class and the books the children read.
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