Day 14: While the 6th grade students are travelling abroad…

Today I have gone to the reading session with the First and Second grade English teacher.  I have introduced myself to the students in the class and made sure they were reading the book aloud. These students had no different books to choose from but a single one they were reading in a whole-group approach. This variation was because the student had some pupils with special needs and working with the same book she made sure all the students were following.

In the first hour, I went to 1^st B class, and the 1^st and Second grade teacher introduced me to the students and asked me to help a student with Asperger Syndrome do the exam. I went to a separate room - next to the teachers’ one- with another practical teacher and we helped the student with the exam. He had some difficulties in spelling, but the most difficult thing for him was to understand what he had to do on each exercise. The children had a good memory, and we helped them out in telling him what to do and focus on the task to perform. At the end, he finished the same exam as his peers in time, finishing all of the exercises with most of the answers right.

In the next hour, I went to Third Grade with the Third and fourth grade English teacher. There, she told me to help another student with special needs do the exam his class had to sit on that time. The difficulties this student had were related to how to do the different exercises, and somehow to reading comprehension ones. I followed the teachers’ advice of using colors to find the answers on the readings, and helped her with the rest of the exercises as well, following my tips, indications and advices. I made sure the student would have time to finish the exam, and that she was not given any answer but given learning strategies instead.

I told her to check for word spelling on different exercises in the same work sheet, to highlight important words and to work systematically focusing on a single task, not to waste time looking at the rest until the first one is finished, unless she did not know the answer for the first one. Of course I taught her that through simple indications she could understand, by using the English language all of the time.

After the break I was asked by the third and fourth grade teacher to do an oral exam for the students to sit on. I called them one by one, asking them questions in English. If they answered the whole answer correctly I had to write down a tick, if they missed some words or pronounced it incorrectly different ones, and so on. The exam worked well and the students were usually well prepared. In the afternoon after lunch, I did the same test, taking back students in order. It was interesting to see how many questions in English they were able to answer.