Classroom Discourse

Typically the types of questions that are ask are the mean of words or how to say these words. Mrs. P always responds in a respectful manner. Today we had a tricky word. Lamented. Students say perplex, " lemontid?" Mrs. P. smiles, "La-men-ted not lemontid." Soon enough another student says allowed, "LAMBENTID." Mrs. P repeats with a smile, "Lamented." Mrs. P. responds to most questions in this pleasant and patient tone.
This is actually a fairly engaged class. One student that stand out as a non-participation would be one of the ELL students. This student speak English fine, however reading aloud is tough and maybe a little scary.
One particular student has a problem with sticking with relevance in discourse. This student is too much fun, however many of his contributions have nothing to do with the current discussion. This is attributed to his disability and today he didn't have his in-class aid so he tried focusing his powers of distraction on me. I tried my best to resist.
I don't get to hear students outside of Q & A and aloud reading. I would say the boys talk more than the girls. Mrs. P's son who is in the class seems to talk a lot in class discussion, because he is comfortable with his mother, as it should be, this attitude transcends through-out the classroom.
I also wanted to add that this is very much an IRE discourse pattern in the classroom which must be very characteristic of Elementary school children. I'm interested to hear what my fellow Elementary school goers have experience with discourse at their practicums.

The wonders of student writing

Student writing is addressed with worksheets, read-a- longs and games. Most days I come in early during their skills block. The skills block includes the expectations for the Benchmark test. Today I want able to see an sample of the students' writing. Not all of these students are from Mrs. P's class. She teaches the mid-level students during this time. I noticed a lot of the students were attaching -ing to infinitive words that needed to be changed such as "exploreing" and haveing". Many also still use a phonetectic based spelling system such as, "yous" for use and my favorite, because it is so creative, "perfefshinal" for professional. The word believe was hard for most students with spells like , "beliefs"( awhile correct spelling not the word they meant), "belives" and "beleive"the last one I'm sure is common for students and must be one of the difficult ones because the teacher had wrote the word on the board.
One student didn't put any distinctive spaces between words. Some students tried to use commas, but used them incorrectly or was a simple imitation of what the teacher had on the board. I was told that they learned how to use commas in the previous grade. I was impressed that one of the students had use colons correctly (half the time)in their paper, which means they must have had a lesson on them.
One student tried to spell the word "animal," "anaimale" and then "amale"
In this particular lesson plan the was called a Self Portrait Poem, it was more of a listing than a poem, one student number their traits. In other lessons, students are being taught the 3 paragrpah form: intro., body and conclusion.