Great teaching almost always involves seizing the
moment and doing what's right in response to cues
from children. The video in this course is full of
such moments. We would like to review three
examples with you.
When the child's initial answer seems completely unrelated to the lesson in progress, Ursula probes more deeply and finds a connection between the initial sound of the girl's uncle's name and the sound they are studying. These kinds of connections to something familiar make the learning much more meaningful, giving the child something concrete to think about in trying to understand an abstract concept.
When the boy unexpectedly writes the letter w, Ursula probes, trying to understand how the child has learned this particular letter-sound correspondence. Her probing helps reinforce to the student that he has made a significant conceptual leap.
Even the best teachers aren't perfect. We all can learn from critiquing one another's practice. We have chosen three examples where we thought the teachers could improve their practice. We'd like you to review these examples.
Carrie is a superb teacher assistant. Yet with the time to analyze every individual moment of her instruction, we can sometimes see small ways that she can improve. In this video, she says, "I Knew Two Who Said Moo... Do you know why they sound the same? They rhyme... It's called rhyming when two words sound the same."
We believe her final statement could be more precise and that this would help some children who may be having trouble grasping the concept of rhyming. She could have said, "This book is called I Knew Two Who Said Moo... Do you know why the words end with the same sound? They rhyme."
The book Ursula has chosen to teach alliteration is quite a compelling one. Yet the appropriateness of this lesson really depends on the level at which her children are functioning. If her students have already been introduced both to sounds and letter knowledge, they will understand the lesson. However, some of the students in her class are still struggling to hear the sounds in words, and we think those students would have an easier time grasping that concept if they were not attempting to use both letter names and sounds at this point.
After using Hop on Pop to teach rhyme, Ursula also finds a creative way to use the book to teach the concept that sentences are made up of individual words. While her approach of having children jump up when they hear the target words like hop and pop is memorable, it doesn't mark each individual word in the sentence. Again, if her students had some understanding of the concept of words in a sentence, this activity may have been easily grasped. However, we see some room for confusion.
