Placement Reflection
Throughout my 2nd mid-year professional experience opportunity, I worked with a group of 17 foundation students. This enabled me to observe many literacy sessions, including reading and writing. I enjoyed the opportunity I was given to assess students reading with the use of Running Records. Assessing students is an area in which I was completely unfamiliar and uncomfortable with at the beginning of placement, but now I have practised assessing students in reading which has opened my eyes to the diverse abilities of all students.
Although each literacy session was run in different literacy groups, which allowed the teacher to differentiate tasks, this was not the case in writing. The whole class would always complete the same writing tasks, which was difficult as two students were unable to hold a pencil properly so often did not actively participate in writing tasks. There was also a group of high students, who would finish writing tasks within 10 minutes of the lesson. This also meant that they were not actively participating throughout the lesson, as they were finished early most of the time and had no ‘going further’ tasks.
One writing portfolio piece that all of the students completed was based on the story ‘The Day the Crayons Quit’. The whole class read the story together and students selected a crayon to focus on. They wrote about how the crayon was feeling in the story and why they were feeling that way. Although this took many lessons to complete, the students completed a rough copy followed by a good copy that really highlighted their writing and handwriting skills. Below is an example of one of the students’ posters. Note * Lynn is an example name used
