My Job As An Instructional Aide

My field experience lasted from Sept. 12, 2016 to Nov. 14, 2016; every Monday I had the incredible opportunity to come into the lives of about fifty students – one class of seventh grade English Language Arts (ELA) students that I spent most of the class period with, and one class of eighth grade ELA students that I spent the whole class period with. During my time with them, I assisted students during their tests and quizzes, helped their teacher with lessons on grammar and the English language, and together their teacher and I created a “Reading Club” for three male students in the eighth grade class who were reading at a first grade level.

When I registered for this class, one of my main concerns was my lack of knowledge and experience as an active participant in a reading program. My background as an EFL teacher, and later, as faculty, provided me opportunities to teach how to read in a second language, and be aware of the importance of reading as a study strategy in higher education contexts. However, I have never been a reading teacher in elementary or middle school, nor been part of curriculum design, or a language arts specialist. This lack of experience put me in a position where I questioned my abilities to discuss what reading leaders do and what good practices for a reading specialist are.

Firstly, as Napoleon Hill once said "It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed", I want to be able to directly provide support for new undergraduates and help them achieve their academic goals as a senior student. As a person who enjoys learning individuals' studying style and discovering different ways of teaching to help others reach their full potential, I believe that there is no job as rewarding as teaching. The satisfying feeling a teaching assistant can gain from helping students who have trouble learning is truly incomparable. Moreover, being a upperclassmanot only do I want share my amazing experience and advice for the new undergraduates but also as many students may feel intimidating to talk to the professors, I want to become a perfect link between the professor and students as well.

To help increase Joe’s ability to read his writing aloud, the teacher can provide content instruction and timely feedback. In my strategies for Joe’s second goal I emphasized that “Students need to be able to connect the tasks of an assignment to their own

Reading is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information which is essential in being a productive member of society. If and when a student missed an opportunity to learn the skills necessary for reading, it’s has a profound impact on their lives. As educators we realize that teaching all children to read requires that every child receive excellent reading instruction. We are also aware that children, who are struggling with reading must receive

Overall, the read aloud lesson was a great experience in which I learned many aspects about myself. I believe that conducting more read aloud lessons would help me improve in tone and fluency for reading. Also, in my opinion, an interactive read aloud is a great way to assess students’ knowledge of the central message of a book. I will use the interactive read aloud lesson in my future classroom ever change I get to help my students be

Pamela Quick was my speech teacher in elementary school. Apparently I struggled in every subject especially reading and writing. At a young age, I knew reading or writing didn’t come easy to me and I didn’t understand why. Before I started kindergarten, my parents were told that I had a reading efficiency. So because of that, I was introduced

“A Read Aloud Curriculum integrates intentional direct comprehension and explicit vocabulary instruction into read alouds while maintaining the integrity of an authentic read aloud experience that would be highly engaging for students (Fien, et al., 2011).” The Read Aloud program is structures as to “(a) set a purpose for reading, (b) building vocabulary knowledge, (c) making text-to-text and text-to-life connections, and (d) having students retell stories or information on a regular basis (Fien, et al., 2011).” The problem is that Read Alouds by themselves do not help close the gap between children who enter school with strong vocabularies and children who enter school with weak vocabularies, accordingly the gap between students with strong and weak vocabularies only grows as the children progress through school. Another setback for students with weak vocabularies is that there is a direct link between word knowledge and comprehension, consequently the children with weak vocabularies will struggle with comprehension. Small-group instruction shows promise in improving student’s vocabularies thus improving their comprehension. By spending more time with the text and receiving instruction in a group of 2-5 students, those with weak vocabularies have shown improvement in their word knowledge and

I am writing to express my interest in the, Teacher Aide position, that is currently available with your organization. Currently, I have ten months of experience with Child Care Services and also completed my Bachelors Degree, from Troy University, in Criminal Justice and minored in Psychology. I feel that your needs and my skills are an excellent match.

I can hear my heart pumping faster and faster. With every breath, it pumps a little faster. I count each person ahead of me in my roll. Pam will read paragraph one. Carl has paragraph two and Donna will read paragraph four. That means I will read paragraph five. I go over every word making sure I can pronounce each one correctly. I am not aware of what the others have read. My only concern is not to make a mistake. It is my turn. Yes, I made it. Wow, glad that is over! What I have described is my early reading experience in elementary school. Reading was not something you did for pleasure. Reading was something you maneuvered through making sure you didn’t explored by the bombs of vocabulary. It was not something you enjoyed. My parents were very strict about education. They knew their children were intelligent, so if you were not doing well in school you were playing around. I remember every time I had to read or go to the board to answer a problem, I would always make a mistake. I believe it was due to the amount of stress of possible failure. When my teacher told my parents that I was having a problem at school they thought I was just being lazy. I was immediately punished.

When I was little my folks could never read to me. Being determined to have ADHD and was placed in Special Ed class in primary school and going to Sylvan I've discovered that I read superior to at composing since I was never instructed how to be a decent essayist.

For the second observation, Reading, I again chose to go to Durham Public Schools: Forrest View Elementary and observe Ms. Rogers during her designated literacy block. I really enjoyed the diversity and experiences these students have attained as it creates larger funds of knowledge and therefore a better observation experience for this course. From the text we had been reading in EDUC 616, I expected to see several types of reading methods such as: guided reading, independent reading, and closed reading (read aloud). However, in my time observing I saw two of three strategies: closed reading, read aloud, and independent reading. On the day of my observation, Ms. Rogers had chosen to read a book about ants and their habits to successfully

During our field observations this semester we were given the opportunity to lead a read aloud in the pre-k classroom we were in. It was challenging and exciting chance to be interactive with the students and they be interactive with me. My impressions of my read aloud is that I did a “good enough” job to keep the children engaged, and feel as if they were learning, not just listening. I feel that I could have done a better job with many things, but with the setting, and limitations that felt I was in, I believe I did a well enough job to have a successful read aloud in a real classroom setting. One key however, to my success was the worksheet we were given, planning for an interactive read aloud. I was able to use this to my advantage, and be prepared for what needs to be introduced prior to reading, what needs to be done to make sure I along with the students were being active readers, and being ready with a closing to wrap-up what was taught during the reading.

This essay examines teaching reading to lower levels in order to achieve detailed understanding. Reading is often overlooked in the classroom context and lower level readers find it difficult to handle and dull. However, reading comprehension in class can provide the students with the necessary language skills in context and facilitates the development of not only receptive, but also productive skills. As Jeremy Harmer argues, “receptive skills and productive skills feed of each other in a number of ways” (Harmer 2007: 266). He continues arguing for the importance of input and how what we see and hear influences the way we write and speak. This is definitely the reason why a good reader makes a good writer, but not vice versa.

When data from students who had average accuracy and fluency scores, but lower comprehension scores were compared to data from those with similar accuracy and fluency but average comprehension, the consistent differences were found to be lower oral language and vocabulary skills in the poor comprehenders upon entry into formal schooling. (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor & Bishop) Thousands of dollars each year are spent on intervention, trying to improve the reading of children that show delays. When one reads, the clear goal is comprehension of what is read. Without communication of ideas between the author and reader, decoding texts is pointless. Most intervention programs are focused on phonics and word decoding. Oral language interventions concurrent with vocabulary and comprehension tasks at age eight have been shown to lead to significant improvements in reading comprehension. (Nation, et al., 2010). Reading comprehension is not merely a product of being able to decode words and sentences. How we teach children to process and integrate the ideas found in text can have a large impact on their ability to function in a world of ever expanding knowledge and information.