Sunday, October 4, 2009

Aimee Frantzen's Guided Reading

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytE0pGoKw4&feature=related

My guided reading clip being only 9 minutes and 39 seconds long in length was likely just a small portion out of a guided reading lesson that these first grade students took part in. What was interesting to me was that when the teacher was sort of re-introducing the guided reading lesson she talked about how the children who each had a buzzer would buzz in on a question, and whoever buzzed first would give the answer and if the answer was correct the student would get a point. At the end the student with the most points would recieve a skittle (just one skittle?? hah!). I thought the use of a "token economy" was sort of interesting to see within a guided reading lesson although I am not sure I like the idea because I feel as though it means kids would be answering questions for reasons different than the just prove their reading comprehension. On the other hand, it is bribery in a sense for students to complete their reading so they may answer comprehension questions correctly. One thing I did like was that before they began talking about the book the teacher had a short discussion with students on how to be a good reader. This was similar to some of the things we saw in the guided reading video in class that we watched last week and I thought this was a good idea in general. One thing I did not necessarily like or agree with was the question format, all the questions asked during this almost 10 minute clip were multiple choice, they were not open ended and in my mind multiple choice questions do not make good questions for reading comprehension purposes. An example of a question asked in the clip is seen below:
"What are the different types of corals?" - This is a good representation of the questions asked.

Towards the end of the clip the students seemed to be getting bored and fidgety although they were still participating, I feel the questions although they were at a first grade level, may not have been challenging enough for these students. One thing I thought was good though was that the teacher was asking somewhat unplanned follow-up questions in regard to some of the students' answers to her original question, this lead to very little reflection though this reflection was good.

I thought this was a mediocre example of guided reading. In all I really would have liked to have seen more open-ended questions.

No comments:

Post a Comment