Sydney_CO3

The last class that I went to observe was Calyn's Reading Class. Her class is a Level 1 class, so every student was a beginner. I am really glad I observed more than one level of Reading class. It is so helpful to be able to compare the different levels. I came in early to talk with Calyn before her class started. She told me that all of her students were male and all were Arabic. Something interesting that I noticed was that all the students were leaving at the end of the week to go back to their hometowns for Ramadan so Calyn's lesson plans were going to have to be pushed up. She was very understanding and accepting of the changes and she did a great job of making sure the students got all the information for their final exams. When the class started, she introduced me and I gave a little background about myself. I used the phrase "brownie points" in my introduction and so Calyn asked her students if they knew what those were. We spent a few minutes dissecting that phrase, then we moved on to going over a pronoun quiz from the earlier class. All the students did very well on the quiz. Calyn did a great job of explaining foreign vocab. She speaks very slowly and enunciates very well. The lesson that day was on summarizing and paraphrasing and the differences between both. We read a short passage on "Telecommunication" and the students were given note cards to write a short summary. At the end of the class, we read along with Calyn as she read aloud to a book. All the students were very interested in the story.