CCHS 03-24

On March 24, I worked in Mrs. Johns classroom. There were two other mentors in the classroom with me, Melanie Beadles and Kaelynne Boyd. This week, the students took their usual Friday quiz over what they had been learning that week.
Since the computer system was down while I was there, I got the opportunity to help two students complete a packet over prefixes and suffixes. One student was less engaged and was not interested in completing the work, which posed a problem for me. Though he did complete a few things, while I was working with the other student, he was looking at his phone and texting instead of completing the assignment like I had asked him to.
The other student was very engaged with the material. Though he was listening to music, it was clear that he wanted to get this task done so that he could move on. We had a lot of fun working on one of the tasks, which was a type of matching game. On one side of the paper, there was a list of prefixes and students were instructed to decipher their meaning using three other columns of synonyms, words containing the prefix, and lastly a definition of the word that contained the prefix. For me, it was a refresher as well! The student clearly enjoyed working on it, and I got a chance to spend more one-on-one time with him through it.
The activities in the packet that I was instructed to teach were quite effective for the one student, but not for the other. There are many outside reasons that the one student may not have been engaged, but I would love to have been able to sit with him in a more one-on-one situation so that he could complete his work on time. I believe that, had I been able to sit on the other side of the table from them rather than between the two of them, we might have gotten more work done as a group.
It was a good day and I feel that my student and I were able to get a lot done while also having a good time and laughing at the fact that we were both trying to figure out what the prefixes mean. Coming down to the student's level made him feel much more comfortable and he was more receptive to my help. He knew that I was learning right alongside him.