A Visit to Tamassee-Salem Elementary

I really miss working with students. Every now and then I'll dream that I'm teaching a group children and vividly remember how sweet it is. I thoroughly enjoy getting into our special education classrooms and observing instruction. It reminds me of my first love...teaching. On Friday afternoon I was able to visit Tamassee-Salem Elementary and observe a resource class. The students and teacher were reviewing vocabulary words on a Smartboard from a recently read book titled Superfudge by Judy Blume. The teacher offered the students a choice to either make a sentence or provide a definition. Every now and then a student would need prompting..."Do you remember how the word was used in Superfudge?" The teacher was very kind and respectful toward her students when the target word was used incorrectly. She provided a definition then used the word in another situation relating the learning to a real-world experience. The teacher tapped into the Knowledge Dimension of Meta-Cognitive Knowledge in Bloom's revised taxonomy as she asked her students to evaluate their own knowledge level of the vocabulary words being studied. Having an understanding of the English language is essential to adademic progress across subject areas. Likewise, having an understanding of vocabulary is the key to unlocking the joy of reading. It was a delight to observe a thoughtful and effective teacher helping her students move past the barriers of unknown vocabulary so they could understand the literary elements of Superfudge. Great lesson!