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Evidence Based Reading (4-8) Field Experience

For my reading field experience, I went to Harrisburg Adventure Elementary, I was in

Ms. Leah Wright’s class. I went to the school from December fifth through December eighth.

When I went from 1:00 to 1:45 p.m. I was in an all fourth-grade classroom, but when I went

from 8:45 to 9:45 a.m. there were second to fifth graders in the classroom.

The first thing I noticed when I went to Harrisburg Adventure was the set up that the

elementary school has. When I was first heading to Ms. Wright’s classroom, I walked into an

open area that was for third grade to fifth graders. The space has their iPads and different reading

spaces for their students. When I went to the school from 8:45 to 9:45 a.m. on December seventh

and eighth for the personalized learning guided reading time, I was able to see how this space

was used. During this personalized guided reading time, students could go out into the open area

and do their centers. One of the reasons I liked this was because students could partner read in

different areas, so the class didn’t become too loud.

For fluency, Ms. Wright would read the short stories that the students were working on.

In the small groups during the morning personalized reading time students, Ms. Wright and I

listened to the small group take turns reading their story. After the small group the students

would work on writing who was in the story, what happened in the story, where the story took

place, and the end of the story.

For vocabulary, Ms. Wright would say a word then ask students what they thought it

meant. Let students guess and then explain the word and give examples. Then students would try

to spell the word on their paper and underline what they think the syllables are. After each word

Ms. Wright would spell and split the word up into syllables. Ms. Wright would only do three

words a day and was focused on words that contain three syllables. During the personalized
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reading time, I sat with a student and worked with her on splitting a list of words into their

syllables using the clapping out strategy.

For comprehension, we first went through the difference between retelling and

summarizing. Then on the second day we read a short story about rescue swimmers. Then

students went to the next page where they cut out eight different lines from the story. Then they

sorted the line under the table where the stories were either “important to the story” or “not

important to the story”. Ms. Wright and I went around the room helping students figure out what

was important to the story and what wasn’t. At the end, Ms. Wright went through all the answers

in front of the class. On the third day students used the lines that were important to the story from

the day before and created a summary using their own words. One student in particular was

really struggling with summarizing, so I spent most of my time helping her figure out how to

summarize using her own words.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed my time in Ms. Wright’s classrooms. I learned that I do

well in one on one and in group setting teaching and I was pretty easily able to build

relationships with the students I had. This age group is working on learning how to summarize

and break up multisyllabic words. As well as plotting stories. One of the first things Ms. Wright

did was give me a bunch of reading resources that she uses in class. A lot of planning went into

her class, especially the personalized reading time which was split up into colors and numbers

which let students know what they should be doing.