Observation & Guided Literacy

Anne Schuerger
University of Alaska Southeast
ECE 661 Fall 2020

 It has been really fun to observe in a kindergarten classroom this fall. Our district is back
to school full time, a normal school day with the addition of masks and distancing. This has
decreased class sizes as many parents opted to homeschool leaving a lovely class of only twelve
students. Our district has also switched to a new ELA curriculum this year which my host
teacher, Patricia, says she is extremely excited about and has really enjoyed so far. She said “Our
social and emotional learning is tied into the ELA curriculum…and this curriculum is exactly
how I was taught to teach thirty years ago”. This parallels Johnston’s (2012) theory that “Social
development is the foundation for intellectual, emotional, and physical health, even in adulthood
(p. 67). In kindergarten, a lot of the focus is on what a reader and writer look and act like. It is
hard to remember all these new things but Patricia uses her language to remind students what we
need to do with our bodies and our minds to be active listeners and learners, and participants.
As Clay (2014) stated “Good conversations with children will be good teaching
exchanges, for in conversation a teacher as speaker has to try to work out what his or her listener
is understanding” (p. 10). There is a lot of good conversation that occurs in the kindergarten
morning literacy block. Usually Patricia will read a story and ask students questions about it.
“What do you think will happen next?” and “Why do you think that might happen?”. She doesn’t
add her own thoughts, but acknowledges and engages their thinking, using their responses as a
way to gage their understanding. I love that when she asks a question before she can finish her
sentence almost everyone will raise their hands. This just shows how much children want to be a
part of the conversation even if they aren’t sure yet what that means. This week Patricia called on
a student who did this, his hand shot up as she started to ask and when she called on him he
didn’t know what to say. She waited patiently, he had his head hung down and his hands on his
temples. She asked him again, rephrasing the question, and he said “Sometimes you give me a
minute to think”. She let him consider it a little longer than offered the suggestion of having help
from one of his classmates. This brought his head back up as he chose a peer to relieve him of
the pressure he was feeling. While this student was eager to participate he is still understanding
his role in conversation. Patricia gave him time and offered him a solution that gave him
autonomy, the choice between answering the question or asking for help from his peers. This
helps him to know that it’s okay not to know the answer, and, that this is why we have a

 community of our peers to help us as we learn. Johnston (2012) discussed the importance of
teaching students how to use their social resources, “Learning is fundamentally social. At the
basic level, if a student is unable to successfully recruit assistance or jointly participate in
activities, learning will suffer” (p. 67). Asking students if they would like help from a friend
shows them that they can look to their peers for help not just teachers or adults. Patricia also
builds up the students’ conversational skills by sometimes having students pair up during the
story, and asks questions for students to discuss with partners. She reminds them of what a
conversation with our peers looks like, “Do you both talk at the same time?”, “If you aren’t
talking and your partner is where are you looking, what is your body doing?”. She continues to
build on the idea of the class being a community that shares with and listens to each other.
I love the approach that the curriculum takes on teaching students how to visualize before
they write. Each day before sending the students back to their tables for writing Patricia has them
close their eyes and imagine what they are going to write about that day so that they have a plan.
Patricia: Okay kindergarteners, today we are going to write about something
that you like about kindergarten. Close your eyes and picture what you are
going to write about. Think about something you love about school or
something you love to do at school.

[Kindergarteners have their eyes close, their faces scrunched up tight]

X: Wheee Wheee [big smile on his face]

Patricia: I can see that you are thinking hard but please no talking.

X: [quietly under his breath, still smiling] Wheee wheee.

Patricia: Who would like to share what they are going to write about? X you
were thinking so hard that your mouth was moving too, what are you going to
write about?”

X: I am going to write about going down the slide!

Patricia: Ah so that’s why you looked like you were having so much fun, were
you imagining going down the slide?

X: “Yes!

 Having the students practice this visualization makes me think of this quote from Johnston
(2012), “The problem with apprenticing children into humanity- the intellectual and social life of
society- is that much of the action we want them to understand takes place inside people’s heads.
We have to help them learn to imagine what goes on inside heads…” (p. 69). This was part of his
discussion on social imagination but I think that it also applies to writing and teaching students
the processes of writing, such as planning, that we can’t necessarily model as they happen in our
minds. By sharing with the class how X was thinking so hard he felt he was going down the slide
Patricia shares this strategy to the other students who may still be struggling with creating
images in their head. After the students have completed their uninterrupted writing time, Patricia
has them look at their work and “read” their story to themselves so that they can remember what
their story is about when it is their turn to share. Even though their stories are mostly pictures it
is so fun to see their excitement when it is their turn to tell their story. Patricia has students ask a
question or make a comment after each story is shared, sometimes she models this by asking her
own question or making a comment, the importance of which Johnston (2012) highlights in his
statement that “We have to remember we are not just giving students feedback; we are also
teaching them to provide it….Increasing the responsiveness of the classroom by actively
teaching students how to respond to each other’s efforts magni es the effects of our teaching” (p.
36). Before students can have these conversations on their own, they need the guidance of how to
do so. Being in the “author’s chair” gives them a sense of importance and confidence that they
are indeed writers. Tompkins (2019) mentions this as well in her discussion of the writing
process, and the nal stage of publishing, “When they share their writing with real audiences of
classmates, other students, parents and the community, students come to think of themselves as
authors” (p. 55). This was something that I noticed made a big impact during the shared pen
activity.
Last week students read the book Cat’s Colors, at the end of the story Patricia asked
students to visualize what they would write about if they were going to write a book about
colors. Since we had just practiced thinking about colors I gave Lilly, 5, the option between
writing an alphabet book or a book about colors for our shared pen activity. She chose to write a
book about colors, which didn’t surprise me because she loves coloring! We discussed a plan and
decided we would write the name of the color and then draw a picture that made us think of that

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color. Lilly can recognize and name each letter of the alphabet but doesn’t have all of her letter
sounds yet. She can write all the letters but mixes upper case and lower case and tends to write
certain letters backwards in mirror image. In preschool she wrote almost completely in mirror
image. I wanted her to do some of the writing but she was very hesitant when we started so I told
her that I would write the rst word. She helped me with the beginning sound and after I wrote
“green” we read the word together. The next word was blue, I asked if she could write it and she
shook her head so I asked if she could just write the rst letter and she agreed. I said blue, and
she said “/b/ /b/ /b/ blue. B.” After identifying the sound she wrote an upper case B and I nished
the word. The next word was red.
Me: How about you try to write the next word?

Lill: I don’t know…

Me: I will help, what sound does red start with?

Lill: /r/ /r/ /r/ Red. R.

Me: What sound do you hear at the end?

Lill: /d/ /d/ /d/ D like dog.

Me: I hear a D too, lets put an E in the middle for our /e/ sound

Lill: (Draws a horizontal line right to left and starts to go up) Which way?

Me: This way [shows her with my nger]

Lill: [Moves her marker and nishes the e] Sometimes I do them backward.

Me: Thats okay that is why we are practicing.

Lilly continued to write some of her /e/s backwards but didn’t stop to ask again and I didn’t
correct her. I wanted her to write organically, not copying. I noticed that when she was hesitant
about how to write a letter she would opt to write the upper case instead and that seemed to
relieve her stress. I think that her tendency to write in mirror image was what was holding her
back in the beginning, an insecurity that at home she tends to get corrected on and that makes her
less willing to write for the fear of doing it incorrectly. As she wrote with me though, and I didn’t
correct her, she got more into in. I didn’t do any more of the writing, she wanted to do it all
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herself. While she is still working on identifying letter sounds she has a great strategy of saying
the sound three times, she did it every single time I asked her what she heard. The best part of
this activity was when we had nished our pages and it was time to put the book together. This
process of “publishing” was what got Lilly really excited. She picked a title and came up with
the idea to put all the pages in the order of the rainbow. When we reread the book together Lilly
recognized one of the backwards /e/s she had written but was so excited about it being a real
book her pride overshadowed her “mistakes”. Maybe in the future Lilly can reproduce this book
without her backwards letters as she becomes more comfortable with her lower case letters. This
activity showed me how important it is for students to identify as authors, and I agree with
Tompkins (2019) that “Publication is powerful” (p. 55).
I love the energy of the kindergarteners. They have so much they want to share with you,
whether it’s on topic or not, their need for social interaction spills out. It is up to us as educators
to listen and direct this energy into meaningful conversations. One of my favorite quotes from
Marie Clay (2014) is “We must spend time talking with children, not at them” (p. 18). We must
also model for them how to talk to each other. I am excited to see how the students in Patricia's
class progress throughout the semester and to observe and participate in meaningful conversation
with them.
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 Resources

Clay, M. M. (2014). By Different Paths to Common Outcomes. New Zealand: Global Education
Systems

Johnston, P. H. (2012). Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives. Albany, NY:
Stenhouse Publishers

Tompkins, G. E. (2017). Literacy for the 21st Century. USA: Pearson Education, Inc.