Third Grade

I got to put Barbara Fox to the test!

On a whim I called my Third Grade Master Teacher to see if I can visit the class. She was Ecstatic and had me paired up with a kid struggling with story problems in math. The kid was excited to be working one on one with me, and only me. The rest of the class was jealous and he was so proud.

We went out into the hallway and we discussed the story problems. We went over that these problems only cover adding and subtracting. I had him read the problem out loud and then we would talk about it. The poor kid. He was using all of the decoding strategies for sounding out sounds to make a word he recognized appear.

I have finally seen a struggling reader.

He came up with “Beds on a Necktie” and was so pleased he finished reading the question. I desperately remembered my cueing strategies and asked him if “Beds on a necktie” sounded a little strange. He looked at me, thought about it, nodded and went back to decoding the words. As soon as he deciphered “Beads on a Necklace”, he was even happier. Once he got the correct words, he would re-read the sentence for meaning, set up his problem, and try to solve it.

Now the hard part. He doesn’t understand what the phrase of “How many is left” means for deciding if a problem is addition or subtraction. A 50 -50 guess can only go so far for him.

The best moment of working with this student, was when I was talking about that experience with my teacher over lunch and describing, in detail, the cues and strategies the student was trying. My MT was so happy to have someone else validate her concerns over his reading issue. Now, she had the evidence she needed to get him re-assessed for the limited (extremely limited) space in the reading assistance room.

I was proud of this kid, he never got frustrated and he even wanted to work on the problems later that day.

Thanks, Tony, for teaching me something valuable.