A teaching moment...

Meet Semanur. She is from Turkey and in this picture she's wearing a traditional Turkish outfit (while Ms. Meyer sports the Canadian Ski Bum)...

In class, every day when it is independent reading time, I pull up a student or two, one at a time and read 1-1 with them. I listen for how they decode unknown words, how they make proper phonics sounds (short vowels, consonant blends), ask them to retell what happened or make connections from the book to themselves or another book they've read.

During indoor recess the kids were playing at the carpet and I was marking at my desk. Semanur came up and asked if she could read one of her Turkish books. I said of course. She hesitated and came back over and said, do you want to try to read it with me? How could I resist her cute smile and pondering eyes? So, the roles reversed. I read a few words at a time and she would correct my pronunciation. Then she would explain what certain words meant, like aunt or said. She said, "Look, quotation marks like you taught us in English." She paraphrased what happened in the paragraph and then made a connection to Social Studies. We are learning about danger signs (falling rocks, explosive, toxic, don't swim here) and she said, "Look its like Social Studies, the aunt told the boy don't swim here because the sign says it's not safe." In that moment I felt like so many things came together...and the best part about it? It was in another language. I like these teaching moments...they simply make me smile :)