Blog #8 Sheltered Literacy Video

While watching this video, I noticed a number of things the instructor did with her students.  One of the first things she did was to write the point of the lesson on the boardas well as the goal for the end of class.  This gave the students an idea of what she would be looking for suring group discussion.  She activated their background knowlege while discussing key vocabulary, and previewed it before starting the story which helped with her lower  ability language speakers.  She provided synonyms of the vocabulary words to make the more complex terms easier to understand. for the students.  She chose a story that her students could relate to.  she also held discussions where the students could share their native leanguage with the class and relate it back to the story.  She previewed the story with the students, and even assigned them to find the main idea from chapters.  she created and discussed a graphic organizer.  She gave them reading strategies to use such as inferencing and seraching for context xlues, and was sure to point out any words she thought the students might need help with.  There was also adequate wait time between her questions and the students' responses.  In terms of what I saw the students doing during this video, I saw some of them sing the words of a song encountered in the story using their own native language of spanish.  They made personal connections to the text, and were just very involved in participating in the story discussion.  The students who were not very outspoken during class were likely her Preproduction level students.  Students who gave shorter answers were her Early Production students.  It seemed as though most of the class was made up of Intermediate/Advanced language level students because they were all participating more fully.  It was obvious to me however, that the instructor scaffolded the lesson so that all of her students would meet with some sort of success, no matter how small or large.  She provided a safe environment for them to increase their comprehension abilities.