tara's chapter 13 reflection

this last chapter was on responses. taberski talked about oral responses and written responses. taberski wrote about waiting for responses as well as helping children interact with each other during the response time. she even wrote about improving the questioning technique which is something i think i need to work on because sometimes i would get blank responses from my students because i might have said something that was too complex for them to comprehend. taberski also wrote about the written responses to books. she touched on different ways you can get students to write in their response notebooks or worksheets. she had suggestions like telling the children to write about their favorite part, how the book may relate to their life, or maybe tell how the book relates to another book they have read. taberski even talked about asking the children to share their reading strategies at the end of her workshop session.

i got to read to my students a lot last semester and my mentor teacher always told me to question them while im reading the book to help the students with their comprehension of the book and to help them maybe get some deeper meanings. most times my mentor asked me to bring a book that had a moral to the story so i could question the kids on it and see if they understood what the moral was. i read a lot of the curious george books to the kids because they liked them. the curious george books always had some moral like dont do this or remember to do that and the kids loved it. i would ask questions after every page i read to see if the kids were paying attention to my reading as well as the pictures on the pages. i would ask questions like "what do you think is going to happen next?" or "why do you think george did this or that?" i would get some really imaginative answers and i would ask them for explanations for their responses and my students would respond really well. whenever i asked for morals to the story my kids would give me blank faces. i never could understand why but i figured it was the way i worded my question. so i started to use more simpler ways of asking questions and my kids just fired responses at me. it was great! i also started to use more open-ended questions that required more than yes and no answers. that helps a lot too. and i never had to worry about my students interacting because they always interacted with each other. a lot of times they would build their answers on their previous classmates answers which i thought was a great idea.

i never had control of the written responses because my mentor already had those typed out for the students. she had them typed out on a sheet with lines on it where the students could respond to the question. she also had more sheets of paper in the front so the kids could go up on their own and gran if they needed more paper. i wish i could have made questions for my kids to answer. i think it would be fun to see what their responses would be. my students also have journals that they could write in but most times they used paper. and they had to draw a picture of their response too. ill make sure to think of fun and exciting questions for my kids when i get my own classroom and if i get a lower grade level. i would like to see what kinds of responses they would give me.