Amber Blevins

EDUC 114 - Introduction to Education

Mrs. Toni Lawson
Final Paper: What are the students learning and how is the teacher facilitating this? Describe
instructional strategies utilized by the teacher.
December 4, 2017
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I had the privilege of shadowing Mrs. Mollie Ailey for seven hours a day over the

entirety of fall break. At Marion Middle School, she is a seventh grade English teacher with a

passion for her kids and the work she does. She teaches gifted, special needs, and other students

in four of the six, one-hour periods per day.

Each day began with about 15 minutes of each student reading his or her own AR books.

During this time, the students could take AR tests to reach their point goals and Mrs. Ailey

helped them if it was needed. I noticed many children either did not enjoy doing the reading or

pretended to read as they whispered to friends, but there were some who followed directions and

expectations. I think the students believed that this was a sort of free time to be had at the very

beginning of class.

Following their individual reading time, the students did vocabulary studies. Each week,

the students are given a new list of five words to learn the spelling, definition, and usage of the

words. I arrived in the middle of a week, so I was unable to view how they went over definitions

and synonyms/antonyms, but on Wednesday the students got to come up with sentences in which

they used a word. Mrs. Ailey would call on students who had their hands raised. I think the

students enjoyed doing this because she wasnt forcing them to write sentences on their own and

because they could write sentences about their friends.

On Thursday, they collectively wrote a paragraph using all of the words. Mrs. Ailey led

the discussion of the words and how to form the paragraphs. I felt this was a very good way to

get all students involved in an activity because they got to choose what the story they were

telling was about. Mrs. Ailey had new ways for the students to further understand and memorize

their words each day, leading up to the quiz at the end of the week. Mrs. Ailey would give her
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students a topic to write about in paragraph form using their five words. She and I both like this

because this helps them put the words they were learning into use and creativity.

While silent reading and vocabulary studies were an everyday occurrence, the remainder

of class consisted of different things. On Wednesday, the students learned about what idioms and

figurative language was through an activity. Mrs. Ailey had the students pull a common idiom

from a cup and draw what it literally meant so that they could discuss what it figuratively meant

later in the class. When the drawings were completed, she projected them all for the students to

guess and whoever could figure out the most won a prize. However, in the inclusion class, she

was a little bit more explanatory and simplistic with the work that day.

On Thursday and Friday, the students and Mrs. Ailey read their class book, Walk Two

Moons, aloud and had brief class discussions when something related to something that had

already occurred in the book. This book has a lot of travelling in it, so to get students even more

interested in reading this book, Mrs. Ailey had the students use Chromebooks to look up and

map the locations travelled to in the book. Specifically on Friday after finishing their vocabulary

quizzes, the students worked more independently on their maps.

I found that Mrs. Ailey used a lot of group/class work and discussion to keep her

students attention. I believe the students enjoyed getting to talk amongst themselves with the

help of their teacher to better understand their vocabulary words as well as the book they were

reading. Other than some students disliking the reading at the beginning of class, I found that the

students all seemed to enjoy the way Mrs. Ailey ran the classroom and her lessons because they

were writing stories, using flashcards, and making creative things.