Xueping CO 1

       On May 7^th, I went to Calyn Stringer’s reading class.  Before I chose her class to observe, one of friends at CIES, Sallem had told me some information about this teacher.  Calyn is his favorite teacher at CIES.  I was so curious about her that I decided to go to her class for my first observation class.  This is a Group 1 class at CIES.

       After I had greeted with Calyn and introduced myself to the class, She started her class with a picture of house.  The topic of this class was about Main Idea.  She showed this picture to the students and asked them what they had seen in this picture.  I think this was a great way to help students to understand what main idea was. After that, Calyn started to explain the definition of “main idea”, “controlling idea” and “topic”.  In order to help the students to understand the meaning of “control”, Calyn asked one of the students to pretend to be a blind man and to do anything she told him.  Cool! All the students concentrated on all the details and learnt about the differences among these three concepts.

       When Calyn realized that most students had known the meanings of the three concepts, she asked them to read the handout one by one so as to reinforce their memory.  Then, she passed out a story handout, which is a short story about older people in the U.S.  The students read the story and identified the topic, the main idea and the controlling idea of this story.  I noticed that she gave each student a chance to participate in the activities when she asked them to answer her questions.  

       At last, Calyn gave the students another worksheet about baseball.  That was also a short paragraph.  The students identified the new words, such as “slippery”, “mud” and discussed them in class.  Calyn came up with some information questions to remind them to focus on some details of this paragraph.  Students were very confident to tell the class what was the topic and what was the main idea.

       Calyn ended her class by asking the students to finish a reading log. It was the first time that I found that teachers asked students to listen to an English song and write down the lyrics as their reading assignment.  Awesome!

       When I left Calyn’s reading class, I knew why my friend loved her class so much!