1. What reading skills were focused on the lesson?

The Grade 3 students focused on skimming to get a general hint about the passage being read; improving vocabulary; silent reading; answering questions about the selection; and relating the reading matter to real-life situations. Knowing about the motives for reading can also count as a skill. 2. What activities did the teacher present to develop the skills? First, the teacher asked the students about their real-life experiences. That helped activate the prior knowledge (schemas) that the students had. Then she asked the students why they read, and from the discussion there emerged two major answers: for following instructions and for entertainment. (In a discussion that we had with the teacher after her class, she made a distinction between motivating questions, which are meant to activate schemas, and motive questions, which are meant to help readers clarify their purposes for reading. Before the reading activity, the teacher also gave some vocabulary words and told the students to look their meanings up on a dictionary. That is not the usual procedure, though; it is preferable that the students give the meanings of their vocabulary words on their own words. Then the reading began and proceeded silently. (After all, most of the reading being done for informative and entertainment purposes is silent, so it is wise that students develop this skill early on.) The teacher then flashed some comprehension questions, or questions meant to determine whether students have understood the text and to stimulate discussion in the class, in the whiteboard through a Powerpoint presentation. The three levels of questioning are applied. Students were asked questions about the animal characters, the events, and their real-life experiences that have strong connections with the story. Finally, there came a discussion about antonyms. The teacher first showed students some antonym pairs (hot-cold; light-dark; etc.) Then she made students determine the antonyms of some words flashed on the whiteboard. Most of the words came from the story. Finally the students answered an examination about antonyms. 3. What particular part of the lesson affected you most? Why? It is the questioning part which resonated with me the most, especially because provocative questions are involved. After all, everything else is standard operating procedure on reading, whether in the classroom or out of it: knowing new words by context or by using a dictionary; silent reading;

identifying prior knowledge (which can occur during reading or before it); skimming and scanning; and so on. The questioning part involved three questions whose answers can be derived easily from the selection, and a fourth one which is: In what ways do animals behave in the same way as humans? In the story, because the main character, a bird, disobeyed her parents, students are encouraged to remember experiences in which someone disobeyed legitimate authorities; because the bird delayed her main task for so long, students are made to recall some experiences in which someone regretted procrastinating. 4. Did the teacher encounter some problems in the duration of the lesson? If there were, how did the teacher handle them? There were two issues, one major and one minor. The major issue is that some students are answering in Filipino while in an English reading class. The teacher, however, said that it was no problem for her; after all, the students comprehension of the reading material is more important to her at that time than precision of speech. (That is not applicable in a grammar class, though, where correctness is everything.) The minor issue is related to the discussion on the antonyms; the teacher often reiterated to the students that they have to read the words first before giving the antonyms. 5. What is your general impression of the lesson? Overall, I thought then that if people are stimulated to read, they will read. The teacher, through guided questioning before reading, gave students a head-start concerning their understanding of the reading material, and through guided questioning after reading, made students probe more deeply into the selection and relate it to what they already knew. To go beyond that, people should find reading stimulation beyond the classroom so that the benefits that they have obtained from past reading classes will pay off. They should learn how to ask themselves questions, not only before but also during and after reading, because questions stir the mind best. Readers will find Descartes dictum, De omnibus est dubitandum (one must question everything), a useful heuristic.