Today I met with groups 3 & 4 for the first time, so this was their first lesson. These groups are both made up of 5 girls. Group 3 are the girls who scored 70%-79% on my pre-test. Group 4 are the girls who scored 79%-95% on the pre-test.
The girls in group 3 participated in a discussion on new vocabulary words and helped to identify key details from http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/. They seemed eager to ask about words they didn’t understand. The girls in group 4 worked together to identify words they didn’t know and use context clues to figure them out together. Julie is our context clues master. Alana can identify things in the text that are important, but then struggles with new vocabulary in these sections. Alana and Julie worked very well supporting each other in identifying key details and discussing the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words. Grace and Anna were very quiet during this group meeting, they participated in recording key details on paper, but did not contribute to the discussion; they did read aloud when asked.
Kasey said at the end that this group meeting was “awkward.” I’m not sure what she meant by this; I felt like they had good discussion and supported each other well. I asked her who her teacher was last year, trying to understand the context of her 4th grade classroom. This erupted a discussion of the teachers they’ve had for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade and funny anecdotes from each year. Hopefully, this broke the ice a little. Kasey knows a lot about animals. She knew about scientific names, amphibians, and cephalopods. During the discussion of teachers, she offered that she’s in gifted science.
After our group meeting, the classroom teacher asked me to stay while they sang their fluency songs. I sat with Alana, Danielle, and Caleb. Alana shared her lyrics with me so that I could sing along with them. They told me to get the Tour the States song on my iPhone so that I can learn the state capitals along with them. They told me to learn the dance for It’s Gonna Be A Good Day to the tune of JuJu on that Beat. This time with them outside of our structured small group helped me to get to know them a little more.