521- Field Observation #3

TC NAME: Melisa Finney

RICA Domain: 4 – Vocabulary, Academic Language, and Background Knowledge

RICA Competency: 10 –Vocabulary, Academic Language, and Background Knowledge: Role in Reading Development and Factors That Affect Their Development. Competency: 11 – Vocabulary, Academic Language, and Background Knowledge: Instruction and Assessment

Grade Level: 3^rd

            I observed Ms. X conduct a lesson on expressing vocabulary. Through this lesson I saw students build a correlation between learning the meaning of words and obtaining broader concepts. Ms. X used random words appropriate for third grade. The purpose of this activity was to colorfully find new ways to state words. First, Ms. X demonstrated how to find a word in the Children’s Thesaurus. The first word she used was beautiful. She had asked the students a question, “What letter do I need to look for in the thesaurus? Why? She had the students discuss with their partners. Then she asked for volunteers. She called on a student and the student said, “We should look for the letter ‘B’ because beautiful beings with a ‘B’.” Ms. X modeled by indicating all letters until she found the word beautiful. As she walked her students to finding the word beautiful, students were understanding alphabetical order to the second, third, and fourth or fifth letter.

             After a few guided practices with a couple of words, Ms. X instructed for the students to freely choose a word from the thesaurus.  The students had to write about colorful ways to say the word they found. For example, one student decided to work on the word “sinful”. The words he found for sinful were wicked, evil, and bad. Once every student was done writing their words, they had to share with their elbow partners. Then students shared with their table. As the students were conversing through this activity, Ms. X had asked students to try and use some of the words they found in a sentence. For some it was easy and for others they did not know how to use it in a sentence. Ms. X simply modeled how a word could be used in a sentence. She connected her example sentences to her students. For example, “Dane chuckles at Miguel’s jokes”, was an example sentence she used for the word chuckle.

 Instructional Setting:

              The students needed their thesaurus to look for their new colorful words. Also, Ms. X provided paint sample paper to illustrate that the students can make their writing more colorful by using the words they had found.