This week

This week, I observed more and graded papers. The papers I graded were sentences the students wrote using vocabulary words from "Wordly Wise." I noticed that many of the students had associations with some of the words, and they sometimes used those words incorrectly in their sentences. For example, "renaissance" was misused a few times because many of the students have heard about the British Renaissance or have been to the Renaissance Festival, but do not know that the word means "rebirth." One student's sentence read something like--During the renaissance, the people had a lot of livestock and food. Whether or not that's true, the student did not show in the sentence that he/she knew the meaning of the word. On the other hand, a word that was used correctly by many students was "immortality," which they associated with the book Tuck Everlasting. What I learned from this is that as a teacher, I should be aware that students associate words. I can use associations to help them remember meanings of words easier, but I should be careful to help them understand the true meaning of the words.

Another thing I noticed as I graded papers was how often the students left out commas, misspelled words, or ended sentences with prepositions like "at." Sometimes a quick grammar lesson is necessary, even for students who are above average. As a secondary education teacher, I will have to deal with little grammatical errors that students do because either they did not fully understand the rules in the first place or their elementary teachers did not teach them correctly. Many people have a hard time with English grammar, understandably.