New Visions school on 10/20

I observe the 3rd grade classroom in New Visions school today .The class leaders are Hersson and Rose-Lor.
At beginning, when we were waiting the teacher who was checking the homework for each of student in the classroom, I found the teacher had written the homework for 10/20/2008 : One is ELA-spelling and vocabulary and the other is Math-page 39.
Later, I worked with a child whose name is Javier and also he is a hard worker. The teacher told us that he had some challenges to the sounds such as middle or final sounds and spelling. Thus, his reading level is 1rd grade or 2 grade.

Then, he chose
a story-book : Arthur writer a story by Mara Brown. This story is about Arthur's teacher, Mr. Ratburn explained the homework.what should a story about ? Arthur asked. There are three
important things as following: 1) Having a beginning , a middle and an end. 2) Use details. 3)
Be creative.Then, Arthur wrote a story about how I got my puppy Pal, but his friend does not like it which is too boring.Besides, he listens to the other friend's suggestion so that he want to write a story about outer space with some scientific research in the library. Also, he put some jokes and added purple corn, blue elephants and shmellafint in his funny story. Finally, he made up a dance to go with elephants. His family said this one is confusing to them even though it is nice.He can not sleep well because the due date is tomorrow. When he talked about his crazy story in front of the classroom , everyone is so spooky and ask is that really happened. In conclusion, the classmates like the first one which is about his pet.

Being an assistant, I found he did not have enough confident to read loud because some words
he just saw the initial clusters for the word. For example, " don't " and " doesn't." Also, he has spanish background so that some of the sounds that are the same in both languages have different spellings. In addition, spanish does not have a final silent ''e" that marks vowels as being long. Spanish studetns seeing the word "came" might read it as "cahmay." Such miscues
tell me that the student is applying spanish phonices to English spelling and needs instruction in
English phonics.

In order to attack multisyllabic words, first of all, I will see whether the word has any prefixes
or suffixes, if so, pronounce the prefix, then the suffix, and then the remaining parts of the word.
If the word has no prefix or suffix, start with the begining of the word and divide it into syllables.