During my observation of Mrs. Mizenko’s first grade classroom on November 9th, I noticed that Mrs. Mizenko does not teach how to form letters unless one of her students is repeatedly struggling with a specific letter because the children are in first grade and should be able to properly form letters by now. However, if a child struggles to properly form a letter, Mrs. Mizenko writes the letter on the whiteboard and models what the letter is supposed to look like. Once the students reach the word level, Mrs. Mizenko writes the words on the board and points to the connecting letters, demonstrating that letters make up the words the students hear. After teaching that words are made up of letters, Mrs. Mizenko models finger-spacing between words, and this is how Mrs. Mizenko teaches word boundaries while also teaching the children…show more content… Mizenko’s students’ writings have improved considerably, as seen by the pictures included above. Initially, the students were writing three to four words in a sentence, and they were mostly incorrectly spelled heart words. However, after being taught how to structure sentences by Mrs. Mizenko for three months, the students are using four to five words per sentence and sixteen of the twenty-two words, which were mostly heart words, in the November writing above were spelled correctly.
In addition to seeing how Mrs. Mizenko teaches the students to form words and sentences and being able to see the evolution of one of her student’s writings, I also noticed that Mrs. Mizenko teaches the children to organize their writing assignments by using a step-by-step method. Mrs. Mizenko’s students are taught to organize their writing in this order: “Think about it,” “Draw about it,” “Talk about it,”, and “Write about it.” They use this method for every writing assignment they are assigned, whether they are writing about the same topic or writing about a topic that only applies to each student
