Fieldwork Paper

EDDN 637

Spring 2023
 Fieldwork Paper

Fieldwork Notes

Date: 4/10/23
Grade: 4th grade
Lesson: Proper Nouns

Learning Objectives Description/Notes

Students will be able to understand proper Teacher read the learning objective to make
nouns. sure students understood the purpose. She put
emphasis on proper nouns.

Activating prior knowledge: Teacher asked, “What is a noun?” before

-Review what a noun is going into proper noun
(Segway into proper nouns)

Key Vocabulary: Proper Noun- word that names a specific

name of a person or place
Noun
Proper Noun

Materials: Materials were also available to students if

Smartboard they did not have pencil, crayons.
Worksheet
Pencil Table caddies on the desk with materials.
crayon

Strategies used to motivate and engage - Technology (video about proper noun)
student: - Student turn and talk
Technology

Lesson Plan Procedures: 1. Review what a noun is (went back to

old activity)
2. Explain that they were focusing on
proper noun
3. A Proper noun is a word that names a
person, place, or thing, begins with a
capital letter
4. Teacher gave some examples
a. Ex: Russia, Esmira, New York,
5. Teacher played a video (song)
a. Students were engaged by
visuals
b. Video put emphasis on names,
 places, with capital letter
c. Video listed Betty, James…
Sudan, Pakistan….
d. Teacher paused in the middle
and asked students to notice
that all the letters are capital
6. Teacher pulled up worksheet- read the
directions
7. Teacher modeled the first sentence
“When she got to school, juliette
turned in her homework”
a. She read the sentence
b. Used Think Aloud method
c. Circled “Juliette” name
d. Then rewrote the sentence with
the proper noun capitalized.
8. Guided Practice- another sentence
a. Students turn and talk to
discuss which was a proper
noun
9. Students completed the rest
a. Teacher walked around and
checked in on students
b. Conferenced with students
10. After they reviewed with a partner
11. Teacher reviewed as a class

Differentiated Instruction: Teacher had Russian translation on her slides.

Russian words translated (Russian translation illustrated the definition
of a proper noun)

Opportunities for Practice: Students practiced on the given worksheet.

Comments: Teacher pulls class together to review and go

over the worksheet.
She ended the lesson by defining what a
proper noun is putting emphasis on the
capitalization of words.

Assessment: As students were going over the worksheet,

Informal- Thumbs up/down she had students use thumbs up/down to agree
or disagree.

Classroom Management: No misbehavior

Students were engaged throughout the lesson.
 Teacher used hand clapping to gather
students' attention.

Promoting an environment where diversity is Teacher had multicultural flags in the

celebrated: classroom.
Classroom library has books from different
languages.

The following observation took place in a ENL pull out period for 4th grade students.

As CR 154, students at the entering and emerging proficiency level receive 4 periods of push in

and 4 pull out services per week. For this period, the ENL teacher was servicing a group of 6

students with entering and emerging levels. During this period, students were focusing on proper

nouns. To begin the lesson, the teacher read the learning objective and placed emphasis on

proper nouns. She explained to students that they were going to be building on what they knew

about nouns. To refresh their memory on what a noun is, the teacher referred back to an old

activity the students completed about nouns. The teacher explicitly linked past learning to

today’s lesson of proper nouns (Echevarria, 2017). From there, she explained, “Today we will

be focusing on PROPER NOUNS. Everyone say - PROPER NOUN.” She slowly enunciated the

word and asked students to repeat. The teacher continued to explain that a proper noun is a word

that names a specific person, place, or thing. She listed out examples on the board using her

name, New York, Esmira, and Manhattan. She pointed out for students to notice that all the

proper nouns begin with a capital letter. During this part of the lesson, the teacher made sure

slowly ennunaicnte her words, give proper wait times for students to take in the new material as

“English learners need extra time to process questions in English, think of an answer in their

second language, and then formulate their responses in English” (Echevarria, 2017). “Although

teachers may be tempted to fill the silence, English learners benefit from a patient approach to
classroom participation, in which teachers wait for students to complete their verbal

contributions” (Echevarria, 2017).

Following the examples, students watched a video that was in the form of a song.

Throughout the video, students were engaged by the animations and song. The song put

emphasis that proper nouns were names of places, people with capital letters. In the video, the

capital letter was even highlighted in yellow to show the notable difference. After the video,

students practice on a given worksheet. The teacher handed out the worksheet and read the

directions slowly. Before having students complete the worksheet, she modeled the first

sentence. The teacher read the following sentence out loud- “When she got to school, juliette

turned in her homework.” The teacher used a think-aloud method to demonstrate identifying the

proper noun. She said, “Hmmm… school, homework, are just regular nouns, but Juliette is a

name of a person, so it must be a proper noun!!” Then she circles the word. After circling the

word, she asked students to use thumbs up/down if they agreed. After students agreed, she

rewrote the sentence with the proper capitalization of the name Juliette. After modeling this

example, the teacher also used another sentence as a guided practice. During the guided practice,

students did a turn and talk to discuss which was a proper noun. Students completed the rest of

the worksheet on their own. During independent work time, the teacher lead 1-1 conferences

with students to ensure they were understanding. Teacher was successfully able to meet with all

students being that it was a small group. After students were done, the teacher encouraged them

to talk with a partner to check their work. Finally, to conclude the lesson the teacher went over it

as a whole. The teacher went through the sentences and called on different volunteers to

participate. The teacher also made sure students were accountable for checking their own work.
 While the lesson seemed simple, the teacher incorporated various strategies to benefit the

language learners. Throughout the lesson, the teacher was consistent in her pacing for students.

She enunciated words slowly and clearly. “Teachers will increase students’ understanding by

using appropriate speech coupled with a variety of techniques that will make the content clear”

(Echevarria, 2017). The teacher was also patient and gave ample amounts of wait time between

explaining something to students. “Research supports the idea of wait time and has found it to

increase student discourse and enhance student-to-student interaction” (Echevarria, 2017).

Furthermore, the teacher lesson was also heavily centered around procedural scaffolding, which

refers to using explicit teaching, modeling, guided and independent practice with an exception of

evental student independence (Echevarria, 2017). The lesson was carefully scaffolded to

incorporate explicit teaching, a model, a guided practice and independent practice.

In addition to procedural scaffolding, the teacher also had several Russian words on her

powerpoint when explaining the definition of a proper noun. This was especially beneficial as all

the students had a native language of Russian in the group. More importantly, “A culturally

responsive SIOP teacher takes into account the unique linguistic needs of English learners and

modifies teaching accordingly” (Echevarria, 2017). Not only did adding the Russian translation

give additional support, the teacher also demonstrated to be culturally responsive by modifying

her lesson to take into account the cultural backgrounds and language of the language learners.

This was also evident throughout the classroom as multicultural flags were displayed around the

room. The teacher also had library books of different languages accessible to students. All in all,

the combined efforts of comprehensible input and modifications made this specific lesson

meaningful to our language learners.

 2nd observed lesson
Date: 4/17/23
Grade: 4th Grade
Lesson- Read Aloud: Catch Me If You CAn

Learning Objectives Description/Notes

We can understand content by listening to
a text multiple times. Teacher displayed on the board and read
learning objective to students.

Activating prior knowledge: Build Background knowledge

“The Story of Atalanta”
● Back story of Atalanta (character in
the read aloud)
● 2 short paragraphs
● Students were able to have a brief
description of who Atalanata was
before getting into read aloud

Key Vocabulary: Teacher mentioned vocabulary words that

Adoringly were discussed last week.
Capable She told students they would be seeing these
Spectators words in the story.
disbelief “Remember these words we studied last
week? We will be seeing them today in the
story we read”

Materials: Materials were also available to students if

smartboard they did not have pencil, crayons.
Read Aloud Table caddies on the desk with materials.
Pencil
worksheet

Strategies used to motivate and engage Teacher incorporated video

student Teacher also changed her tone and voice
while reading the story

Lesson Plan Procedures: 1. Quick Mention of vocabulary

2. Build Background knowledge: “The
Story of Atalanta”
3. Discuss that Atalanta is a play. They
will be reading a play today. Teacher
asked students if they had seen a play
before. Showed video of Broadway
play.
 4. Teacher played video of story
5. Stopped the video periodically to
make sure students were
comprehending story
6. After listening to the story, teacher
went back and showed a Text
Engineered version of the story

Teacher shortened the story overall.

Teacher chose to chunk out important parts of

the story with Russian translation.

Teacher labeled characters for students

Differentiated Instruction: Teacher chunks out certain parts of the story

Text engineered (chunks of story with Teacher had Russian words translated
translated Russian words)

Opportunities for Practice: Students were listening to read aloud

- Practice engaging in vocabulary
- Turn and Talk

Comments: Teacher had students discuss what they read.

Students filled in a graphic organizer of
literary elements.

Assessment: N/A

Classroom Management: No misbehavior

Students were engaged throughout the story

Teacher used hand clapping to gather

students' attention.

Promoting an environment where diversity is Teacher had multicultural flags in the

celebrated: classroom.

Classroom library has books from different

languages.
 This observation took place in a 4th grade pull out ENL class. As CR 154, students at the

entering and emerging proficiency level receive 4 periods of push in and pull out services per

week. This period consisted of six students with entering and emerging levels who also all have a

native language of Russian. For this specific pull out period, students were focusing on a read

aloud “Catch Me If You Can.” To begin the period, the teacher explained the learning objective:

We can understand content by listening to a text multiple times. She explained that they were

going to be listening and reading the story together. To refresh their memory, the teacher

displayed vocabulary words from the prior week. The teacher front loaded these vocabulary for

students the prior week. She mentioned that they would see these words again in the story.

Before beginning the read aloud, the teacher started to build background knowledge by

introducing a brief passage about “The Story of Atalanta” which gave students insight to the

main character of the play. The teacher used this as a segway to introduce the main character of

the play. After the introduction of the character, the teacher played the read aloud where students

were instructed to listen to it. The teacher explained that later on they would read a shortened

version of the text. After listening to the story, the teacher displayed a text engineered version of

the read aloud. In planning for the lesson, the teacher specifically chunked out pieces of the text

that were crucial to understanding the plot of the story. In the text engineered version, she

displayed the illustrations of the part she chunked out. In other words, the teacher took

“complicated, lengthy sentences with specialized terminology are rewritten in smaller chunks”

(Echevarria, 2017). Along with the illustrations for that given part, the teacher included selected

quotes from the story. What’s an added benefit, is that the teacher also translated these selected

quotes to Russian as well. This gave students the confidence and additional support to
understand the read aloud. Afterwards, students practiced and filled out a graphic organizer to

show the literary elements of the read aloud.

All in all, the aspect of building background knowledge and a text engineered version of

the read aloud made this lesson so effective. The text engineered version with the added Russian

translations really gave students ample opportunities to comprehend the read aloud. Moreover,

“text engineering serves to make reading a difficult text more manageable and supports the

eventual autonomy of the learner who begins to expect these structures and eventually

internalizes them, thus creating a habit of mind as s/he approaches future texts.” (Billings &

WestEd, n.d). In turn, this builds healthy reading approaches and habits for language learners.

Furthermore, “when a teacher carefully selects a text and prepares students with tasks which

activate or build needed background knowledge, engagement in both text and task is optimized

and learning new information becomes easier” (Billings & WestEd, n.d). This was evident

throughout the lesson as the teacher built background information and knowledge of the main

character prior to the read aloud. Last but not least, “Engagement refers both to a student’s direct

interaction with the text as well as pedagogically guided activity through specified reading tasks”

(Billings & WestEd, n.d). To sum up, engagement was heavily throughout the lesson due to

ample support provided by the teacher. To reiterate, the support of building background

knowledge prior to the read aloud and text engineered version along with Russian translation

worked hand in hand in making the read aloud so attainable for our language learners.
References:

Billings, Elsa, Walqui, Aida, West ED, (2021) The Zone of Proximal Development: An
Affirmative Perspective in Teaching ELLs/MLLs www.nysed.gov/bilingual-ed/topic-brief-4-
zone-proximal-development-affirmative-perspective-teaching-ells-and-mls
Echevarría Jana, Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2017). Making content comprehensible for English
learners: The Siop model. Pearson.