Pronouns

TC Name:  Sarah de Almeida

RICA Domain: 3 Fluency

RICA Competency: 8 Fluency: Role in Reading Development and Factors that Affect the Development of Fluency

Grade Level: 2^nd

Instruction:

I observed Ms. Danielson teaching prosody with the use of pronouns and punctuation. Prosody means to read with appropriate “expression,” and includes emphasis of certain words, variation in pitch, and pausing.  During the last few weeks Ms. Danielson has filled many posters with nouns.  She has four posters one for each type of noun: person, place, thing and animal.  The class worked together to fill the posters with the appropriate nouns.  She displays these posters for the students to reference at any time.  After checking their homework, she hands out an ELD worksheet.  There are five sentences that the students must edit.  She tells the students how many corrections need to be made in each sentence.  Students should be looking for: comas, capitol letters, spelling, and punctuation.   After ample time of individual seatwork, she invites the students to help her edit the sentences.  This ELD is nothing new for the students; they know what is expected of them during this time.

Ms. Danielson reads the new objective to the class and they all repeat it three times together.  Last week they were introduced to pronouns.  A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun (he, she, it).  Today, she is introducing other types of pronouns.  She uses her ipad to show a School House Rocks video to help explain the other types of pronouns.  “Pronouns take the place of a noun because saying the noun over and over again can really wear you down!” The first new type of pronoun she introduced was special pronouns- which, who, and what. The second new type of pronoun was object pronoun- me, you, him, her, us, them, and it.  The last new type of pronoun was subject pronoun- he and she (these go at the beginning of the sentence).  Ms. Danielson shows another video on BrainPopJr.com that also helps explain pronouns. After the video Ms. Danielson models (I do) what she wants the students to do.  She projects this sentence on the doc.cam, “Sarah loves to go to the zoo to see the lions.”  The teacher asks to replace “Sarah” with a subject pronoun. Most of them respond (we do) in unison “she”. If most of the students respond she rewards participation not perfection with moving marbles from the jar to fill the good behavior/participation jar.  She models a few more examples, then they move to the individual workbooks (you do).

They open their ELD journal to page 14.  All of the sentences on this worksheet are question.  On this page the students are responsible for replacing the noun with the correct type of pronoun.  Once they have finished this portion of the task, she invites the students to get in pairs and read the question to their partner.  She wants them to change the tone in their voices to emphasize their question.  The teacher monitors the students by walking around the room and observes their responses.    

Instructional Setting:             

Ms. Danielson encourages all students to participate whether they have the right answer or not.  She wants the student to try to do their best each day.  She rewards effort even if it may not be perfect.  She supports each student and their personal ways of thinking.