Third Visit

Today was my third visit to the elementary school. The previous week I had been placed in a different classroom, because the teacher was absent so I was unsure of where I was going to be placed this week. I met with the VIP’s coordinator when I arrived and she said I was going back to my original classroom and she had a group of six students that I was going to be working with. I was going to take two at a time and work with them on their reading.
I went to the classroom and was set to work with 2 girls. One of them was absent so for the beginning of the class I only worked with 1 student. She was a handful. She was very uncooperative and did not want to read. I think it is because it is not a strong area for her and she would become very discouraged. If she did not know a word she would try to change the activity we were doing. She had a very negative attitude and a behavior problem. The VIPs coordinator was aware of this, because before I went to the classroom she told me if this student gave me a huge problem to just send her back to her seat, because it was common for her. We read a book together and then played Candy Land. The board game was set up to help them learn how to read. They had to read certain phrases before they could move through the spaces.
The second group I took was a boy and a girl. We went through the reading and then played Candy Land and Go Fish. I found that these students read well and had positive attitudes. As we were reading a lot of the other students kept bothering them and trying to play the games with us which was a huge interruption for the students. The third group I took was three boys. One of the boys would not speak and only whispered. Everything he said he would say in a whisper. The other students made fun of him a lot and I explained to them that there was nothing wrong with his whispering and he shouldn’t be treated any different. I could tell it upset him when they made fun of him. He read very well though and I think he was just assigned to me, because of the fact that he always whispered.