Waikowhai Intermediate is a decile 6 school in Auckland. Leanne Smith set up our schedule and even bought us lunch at a cafe. the staff at the school was very nice.
In the first block we visited a class doing a program called smartwords. One group was at the front of the room working with the teacher while the rest of the class was working in their workbooks. The teacher was a friendly American man who had us play a game with the class. The students had to match words with their synonyms and then match word parts with their meaning. At the end of the lesson, he had the four of us face off against the students to select the correct spelling of commonly misspelled words. The teacher used a method called "say sound spell" where the students picked a difficult word and said the number of sounds that they thought were in it. I found it very interested that he focused on the number of sounds instead of the number of syllables.Next, we went to the library. The librarians had a lot of great ideas to improve the library and make it more student centered. Also, they had a program called Lexile which is very similar to Accelerated Reader in the U.S.
The next class we visited was working on techniques to hook the reader. Some students were on the computer playing literacy games. Another group was supposed to be reading passages and answering questions, but they were very off task. The group at the front of the room working with the teacher was listing techniques using the SmartBoard. Another lesson that we got to observe was called "vocabulary detectives." The students read a passage that had underlined words in it. the students had to replace the underlined words with their synonyms in a box at the bottom of the worksheet. Then, they had to identify if the word was an adjective, noun, or verb.
After the second break, we went to another guided reading lesson. I spent the time observing the group that was working with the tecaher at the SmartBoard. The students were the lower group in the class and they were writing a narrative about little creatures called grassheads. They were working on developing their story by creating a setting. The students had to choose landmarks for their make believe city. The lesson was really interesting, and I think that the students were really enjoying making up the story. I was also impressed by all of the teachers in the school that used the SmartBoards. A lot of American classrooms have SmartBoards, but they do not use them like teacher in NZ do.
At the end of the day we observed Rainbow Reading. Apart from listening to the books, the students had to complete worksheets that went along with their stories. The worksheets tested their comprehension.
Tomorrow is our last school. We are flying to the South Island tomorrow night. Since Canterbury cannot host us anymore, we have about 4 days off. The plan is to take a train from Christchurch to Greyson. The train ride is supposed to be very scenic and beautiful. Once we are in Greyson, we are going to see some sights and do some shopping. I am really looking forward to some time off. I think that we all need a little rest after being in so many schools and learning so much information. Next week, we have Victoria University on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, we are going to the zoo and then Brittany and I fly home late that night. I cant believe we only have a week left in New Zealand. The time has gone by really quickly.
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