Kari_CO3

This morning I observed Felicia Ciapetta's reading class. The first thing I noticed about Felicia was that she was very professional, punctual and and jumped straight into the lesson. Her students had their own individual notebooks for this class that had stories and articles in them, and for this particular lesson, she had them read an article about Stalkers in America. The article was split up into eight different segments and each segment was made up of about 3-4 sentences. For the lesson, she had the students pair up and read silently for about 4 minutes. Then afterwards she would give them 2 minutes to summarize and talk about what they had just read to their partners. After that, she would ask her students different questions about each paragraph depending on the content that was covered. She would also help them pronounce difficult words and explain the meaning on new or uncommon words in the article. Later after the class when I had more time to ask questions, Ms. Ciapetta explained her rational for teaching in an extensive style because she said the three key concepts of reading were: pre-reading, active reading, and post reading. The most important to her was active reading, and she said that she wanted to get her students in the habit of re-reading the article to make sure that they actually understood the article, and then by discussing it with their partner, it helped with post-reading and comprehension. Also, when it came time to ask and answer questions, what I noticed and thought was a great gesture, was how Felicia would ask the quieter students to summarize the segment they were going over. It was a great idea to make sure that they were keeping up and not getting confused. Overall, I really enjoyed watching her teach and found her to be extremely helpful for lesson ideas and teaching methods.