As a new student to Brandon Elementary, this student is learning English as a second language. He is currently being included with typically developing children, so this student has encountered difficult language barriers. A strength that I have observed is that he is hardworking. He is always practicing his English and completes his assignments. In addition, he is not discouraged from completing extra tasks to advance his language development. A weakness I have observed is that he tends to question his abilities. When completing tasks, it is easy for him lose confidence. As a result, he tends to be shy from expressing his ideas and sharing his knowledge.. As an English learner, this student has not learned his alphabet and that is preventing him from doing more advanced work in reading and writing that is assigned. Similarly, during class, he is very quiet and seldom initiates any type of interaction with his peers. However, I believe that his lack of socialization is a result of his language barrier.
The teacher that I work with does not have an official intervention plan. However, when I come into the classroom, she is aware of students that have challenges learning. For example, there is another student that has behavioral problems and often has trouble concentrating. Consequently, he was placed with another tutor to provide individualized teaching. Similarly, because this particular student is learning English as a second language, I was placed directly with him to assist with assignments. In this case, my Spanish bilingual skills have given me the opportunity to provide translation and help with his development.
Brandon Elementary School shows signs of having a stable socioeconomic status. According to the 2012-13 School ...
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... competent in his work and is able to properly articulate each letter. Although he sometimes mixes letters such as A and E, these are issues that will gradually disappear with refinement. Furthermore, he is able to pronounce and use large words in his sentences such as computer and erosion. He is also able to enjoy book that are slightly more advanced. For example, he enjoys reading book such as Captain Underpants. While there are many improvements, he still has complications with socialization. He is not able to fully carry out conversations with his peers and engage in complex lessons in science with out translation. Ultimately, I predict that his socialization will improve as his English comprehension advance. With his hard work and commitment to learning English, this student will continue to make improvement and be an par with his typically learning peers.
In the play “The Piano Lesson”, August Wilson utilizes two main characters Boy Willie and Berniece to present the theme of gender roles and sexual politics. The reaction of the siblings toward the piano illustrates the role of a man and woman during the conflict. Throughout the entire play they argue over the piano and struggle with an underlying problem of choosing to honor their ancestors or leaving the family’s history in the past. Boy Willie wants to show respect to his ancestors by selling the piano to continue the Charles’s family legacy. He wants to buy Sutter’s land because Sutter was a white slave master who forced his ancestors to work on the land. However, Berniece wants to keep the piano and doesn’t want to use it because of fear. The disagreement between the siblings shows the play’s representation of gender differences.
During this examination, the administration did not take into account that Serge was not proficient enough in English to fully comprehend the test. Serge was tested in English for the majority of the questions and was unable to successfully answer them due to his language barrier. When Serge was placed into the third-grade class, he had just gone through a traumatic experience wand was undergoing both a cultural and language shock. These events should have played a more prominent role in his assessment. Moreover, Serge was not correctly identified as learning disabled, because of the language barrier present in these tests. Since he was tested in mainly English, it was not that he was disabled, it was because he lacked the understanding of the English language. As specified by Salend and Salinas (2003), in their six recommendations for multidisciplinary teams, students should be assessed in both their native and secondary languages. These results should then be compared in order to determine results (Salend & Salinas, 2003,
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson is taking place in Pittsburg because many Blacks travelled North to escape poverty and racial judgment in the South. This rapid mass movement in history is known as The Great migration. The migration meant African Americans are leaving behind what had always been their economic and social base in America, and having to find a new one. The main characters in this play are Berniece and Boy Willie who are siblings fighting over a piano that they value in different ways. Berniece wants to have it for sentimental reasons, while Boy Willie wants it so he can sell it and buy land. The piano teaches many lessons about the effects of separation, migration, and the reunion of
Grant Wiggins is the narrator of the novel. He was born in the plantation just outside of Bayonne, Louisiana. He lived there until he went away to college, and when he went back home, he was detached from the people in the town because of his education and different religious beliefs. He is easily angered and often very selfish. This is seen in the way that he acts towards Vivian. He consistently does not give her the attention or respect that she deserves. He refers to her children as simply, “the babies,” and only cares about the names of his and Vivian’s future children. Grant goes from shallow and selfish at the beginning of the story, to caring and loving at the end.
For years, people have been trying to figure out ways to equalize the divergent academic achievement rates between rich and poor children. A study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2010 found that, since the late 90’s when they first started monitoring over 2,000 children, media
First, teachers are rarely prepared to handle the challenges of assessing students who have a learning disability coupled with limited English proficiency (Haung, Milczarski, Raby, 2011). Teachers usually have trouble distinguishing between a learning disorders and acquiring a second language. Eve...
Michael Oher was from an all-black neighborhood located in the third poorest zip code in the country. By the time he was a sophomore, he’d been to 11 different schools, he couldn’t read or write, and he had a GPA of 0.6. In his first-grade year alone, he missed 41 days of school and ended up repeating both the first and the second grade; he didn’t even go to the third grade. Oher was one of the thousands of children that have been identified as having four or more of the at-risk factors mentioned by the National Center of Education and Statistics (NCES). According to the NCES, poverty and race are high on the list of things that negatively affect students’ ability to succeed at school. Other risk factors include changing schools multiple times and being held back from one or more grades. Oher’s biography, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, proves how socioeconomic status impacts a child’s academic success because placed in perspective, education is not as important as the hardships of reality.
A fourteen-year-old person from this story is an example of how people gain experience through life lessons. Not all lessons are dramatic, like in this story; but we make important decisions that help us to gain experience. These experiences may be gained through love, gain or loss, but in some way or another they have changed our point of view. The "The Bass, the River, and Shelia Mant", written by W.D. Wetherell, tells about a boy’s first love and his first date. First loves and first dates are something that may relate to everyone. This story show that the outcome of a first date may not be what one expected, but in the end something more may be learned. I think we should follow our heart and to not change for someone else.
Wodtke, Geoffrey T., Felix Elwert, and David J. Harding. Poor Families, Poor Neighborhoods: How Family Poverty Intensifies the Impact of Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation. Rep. no. 12-776. Population Studies Center, Sept. 2012. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
Throughout the nation, education inequality affects many minority students that have low-income which reinforces the disparity between the rich and the poor. The amount of children that have a socioeconomic background of poverty in the United States is estimated to be 32.4 million (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2011). Since many of these children are from
My personal literacy development has been a constant struggle since my arrival in America as a boy with a Spanish-speaking mother and a bi-lingual father. We spoke Spanish at home. As I began school I could only speak a small amount of English and understood only slightly more. I learnt, as young children do, through listening to the people around me and using any visual aids I could to scaffold the gaps in my understanding (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl, Holliday, 2012). My lack of basic literacy affected every area of my learning with only math classes allowing me to feel slightly comfortable due to the international nature of numerical literacy. I quickly developed the oracy skills required to be able to contribute to social and academic situations but unfortunately developed other ways to hide my lack of progress in other areas.
The ability to test a student’s language skills is essential to have as a teacher. Over the years, classrooms have become much more diverse with a wide variety of impairments being presented on a daily basis. Often, these disabilities contain a language impairment that appears as a side effect of the main disability. Unfortunately, assessing language is not as easy as one may think because it is not clearly defined and understood. Kuder (2008) writes that “…language is not a unitary phenomenon- it is ‘multidimensional, complex, and dynamic; it involves many interrelated processes and abilities; and it changes from situation to situation” (pg. 274). Language also develops at different times for different individuals, thus making language assessment an even harder task for test administrators to grade and evaluate. In order to further understand the language impairment that students present, teachers need to be aware of appropriate language tests that could be administered. In order to assure that the best language test is being issued to a student, several various tests exist to choose from. To test a student’s overall language capability, a comprehensive language test, such as the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) or the Oral and Written Language Scales (OWLS), could be administered. If a teacher wanted to test a specific language skill such as pragmatics, phonology, syntax, or semantics, the teacher would need to find the best test for the student’s unique situation.
Richmond, Paulette Natasha. "Wealth and Achievement Gaps: An Examination of Virginia Middle Schools." Ph.D. Old Dominion University, 2007. Print. United States – Virginia.
Our subjectivity is heavily influenced by the amount of education that we receive. The effort that people contribute to enhancing academic excellence today is what makes learning possible and effective. Through the proper use of our academic knowledge we can construct society together. Schooling is an evident pathway toward generating social change and it is important that education is properly enforced and easily accessed by all people. Because education enables a person to grasp an understanding of his or her society, we as educated people have a crucial responsibility for contributing to social advancement.
Through the implementation of my lesson, I learned I have to work on the assessment and the details of lesson planning. During the planning of this lesson, the assessment was an aspect that needed more thought. The students had a problem with reading the words for the word sort and understanding the writing section. If I were to reteach the lesson I would add pictures to the words on the word sort to help the students to read and understand the words. In addition, I would include a sentence strip for the assessment that the students could copy but then finish the sentence on their own. The writing prompt was too hard for the students, I received various answers some students copied the prompt only while other students understood it and wrote appropriate answers.