August 7, 2013

At school, I am working with the Grade 4 students and trying to give them strategies on how to spell certain words.  A lot of the students are having a hard time with this.  Today, we spelled the words aloud, I wrote them on the board and they went outside and wrote them in the sand.  We also continued reading the story about the snail and drew some pictures about it.  The students are enjoying this story, but it is quite the process to get through it.  The students first read a paragraph quietly to themselves. Next we read it as a class.  Then I ask for words that they don’t understand and we discuss these words.  We then read it as a class again.  And we do this paragraph by paragraph so it takes a bit, but we are getting through it and they are increasing their vocab as well as becoming more familiar with sentence structure. 

In the evening, I sat in for an hour of a Distance Group.  This distance group studies at the college on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings for about 3 hours each evening.  They are going through different study guides.  I wanted to see how the process works and the College also wanted me as a teacher to evaluate the class.  Basically, the students who are mainly pastors come in and watch the part of the DVD that relates to their study guide.  They then discuss any parts that they were confused about.  There is a tutor that answers any questions and ensures everything runs smoothly.  I thought it went really well and the tutor really knew the material as he was able to answer some quite difficult questions.