Dennis CO#1

My first class observation was at 11:00 on Monday, in Kyle Kaminski’s Reading Group 3B. When he first entered the classroom, he greeted me and several of his students with a friendly rapport that brought down the affective filter of the class, and made students feel more comfortable with engaging in conversation during the class period. He started off with a quick recap of lessons from the week prior, a reading log that students would update daily. Mr. Kyle asked a student when the reading logs should be due. I found this tactic to be interesting, as it gave one student the responsibility to choose a fair due date for the logs, and it turned out to be a reasonable timeframe for the assignment.

            He passed out vocabulary worksheets to go along with the reading, which came from Great American Short Stories. First we discussed a picture from the story selection “The Romance of a Busy Broker”. Students would follow along and stop him when they came across an unfamiliar word. One of these was “dug” and he explained the simple, past, and past participle of dig, dug, and dug. He was very enthusiastic when moving from reading, to question, to correction of the question phrase, explanation of the word, and back again to the reading. He asked students questions about the story, and plucked vocabulary from the text. He would correct small mispronunciations plainly, and he helped coach students to figure out the words by inferring from the text. He was a great teacher, and had a great, respectful class.