Observation Of 8th Grade Classroom

I did most of my observation in a sixth through eighth grade classroom, however I did get some experience in a third grade classroom and a second grade classroom. I think that one of the concepts that I observed the most was that there are many different ways and curriculums to teach literacy. I saw an example of a basal school, an example of daily five, but I did not actually get to see any reader’s workshop, which was disappointing because that was the majority of what we spent time working on in class (and my personal favorite thus far). I did get to see a little bit of a writer’s workshop, it was very brief but was about narratives in a comic strip form. It was interesting to see a genre applied to the writing, similar to what we practiced in class.

In the elementary grades, literacy was more focused on fluency, phonics, phonemic awareness, etc. while in the older grades, there seemed to be more focus on content and comprehension. The younger grades did more practice of skills and strategies, while the older grades were working on applying the strategies in the books and stories that they were reading. For example, the eighth graders were reading The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, and they were really working on understanding and relating to characters, understanding the author’s motive, inferring, etc. They were using strategies they had already learned and digging into the book using those skills to better