Tue, Feb 13 2007
I am happy to say that the students I work with this semester like me a whole lot more than those of last semester and this makes it a lot easier for me to work with them.
I work with six children from Miss Roddick's third grade class. Almost all these kids are willing learners except for a little girl name Jamajia Johnson. Miss Roddick told me I am wasting my time trying to work with her, this is a fair assessment of of the student, because she seems to be suffereing from ADD. Getting her to do work is a real challenge, however, she has the ability to learn, she is just not willing to do so. As a result she has not made any noticeable improvement but i am trying new ways to keep her attentive hopefully she will become a little receptive. Jamajia is the only student i have this sort of problem with. The rest of the kids are taking great strides towards doing good in their math test.
We are supposed to choose the students with the lowest test scores and i must say Miss Roddick was very helpful in providing me with all i need in deciding which kids to work with. The students she recommended to me turned out to be those who had the lowest test scores. But after working with these kids for a while now, i can say for certain the reason most of these students did poorly in the test has nothing to do with ability. I believe the teacher did a poor job creating a conducive test environment for the students to take the tests seriously. The truth is I love Miss Roddick but her classroom management skills are woefully inadequate.
Now I will talk about each student's work with me in detail.

Thursday, Oct. 12
The past two training sessions were concept heavy, the sessions were conducted by an extremely experienced reading recovery specialist. This man developed what I consider a foolproof child reading assessment. The five finger rule can effectively and efficiently diagnose the reading level of a child. This is definitely a tremendous resource for us, as it will enable us to select an appopriate book for the children.
Another great resource we learned during these two sessions was how books are "leveled". Books are put in alphabet categories corresponding to difficulty.
These two sessions will enable us not only to find quickly what reading level the children are, but we will also know what books will be good for them.

Thursday, Oct 5th
Wow, recollection of those formative days when I was learning how to read. This exercise brought nostalgic yet trying memories of my days in Koranic school. I can still here the teacher bellowing over me for not paying attention. The struggles of learning was truely a life changing experience.
Going back to those early days of learning is meant to make us realizewhat the kids are going through. Maybe some of our experiences mirror that of the children we will be working with. I know learning to read Arabic was as challenging as anything I had done in school.

Wednesday, Oct 4
Today's session is designed to immersed us in the reading mode.We started with the complete breakdown of words, highlighting their phonic and syllabic characteristics.
This exercise is designed to enable us to appropiately and quickly diagnose the reading ability of the children in the program.
Apparently the reading abilities of the kids we will be working varies considerably. Thus getting us ready to adequately handle this diversity is a key element of the program. The session also include an exercise focusing on the effective use of illustration to convey meaning of circumstances and words.

Tuesday, 3rd Oct.
Today's session focused on the topic of book selection. Freedom Summer a book set in the tumultous sixties was given as an example. This book is about an interacial friendship in soon to be integrated South.
The subject matter was deemed a little inappropiate because it will probably not inspire the kids to read more. This makes a lot of sense because the whole raison d'etre of the program is cultivate the love of reading in the kids.

Monday Oct 2
Since we don't haveatraining session today, I think its an opportunity to take stock of the entire first week of training.
The week went quite fast for me because it involved meeting a lot of new people. This is really exciting to me because i genuinely love meeting and making new friends.
At first i questioned the necessity of prolonged training session, but that was simply due to my ignorance. I had no idea what sort of tasks reading buddies were embarking on. I thought it was simply reading to a child. However, this weeks training showed me that the reading involves a lot more than just reading to a child.
Issues such as reading buddy child relationships, the psychology of reading itself, the worldview of both the cild and the reading buddy, and the undertstanding the world the child came from. These are all issues critical to the success of the program, but not immediately evident to an observer.
The Friday session was really interesting. Itwas easy to see that the presenter was in her element. she was very eloquent and had a deep understanding of her subject.Her presentation was very comprehensiveand she did a very good job in making me understand the major issues her departmet deals with.
Despite her expertise, she had a problem articulating some of her views leading to some misunderstanding among the group. Some objected to her examples. Personally I thought she was giving examples she had experienced but some poeople in the group felt she was deliberately focusing on poor people.

Thursday, Sept 28
Today the trianing consisted of the intricacies of reading and comprehension. We had two presenters, taking us through the fine lines of dealing with situations tyat might come up during the execution of our duties as a reading buddy.
The first presenter gave a lively and very informative lecture of how to deal with the psychological aspects of dealing with a child. She spent most of her lecture on the best practices of student reading buddy relationships. These include how best to help a child without being too attached, and also ways to dispense our duties without being completely robotic or detached from the child.
Thesecond lecture was an indepth explanation of reading comprehension skills.

Wed, Oct 27 2006
Today's training session was interesting, we disected the Shark attack book. This exercise will enable us to make the book accessible to the kids.
We also had to introduce each other. It was fascinating to see how I personality types introduce others.