Teacher Work Sample: Unit: Short Vowel /e/ sound

1. Contextual Factors
The Elementary School Nueva Urbana is located in the town of Ceiba, P.R.
The school has over 500 hundred students enrolled in the respective sixth grades.
The enrollment of the students varies from all kinds of social economic
backgrounds. Moreover, the majority of the students come from government
controlled apartments. This fact clarifies that most of the students’ family have
low class income. The school offers a variety of orientations that aim to extend
knowledge to the parent
The classroom where I would be teaching it has a very comfortable size.
The area is pretty spacious and it has air conditioning facilities. Also this
classroom has a television set and radio for the benefits of integrating technology
in my lessons. This classroom is the homeroom of the first grade teacher Mrs.
Cruz. My cooperating teacher Mr. Rivera also has an English laboratory classroom.
This laboratory is mainly use when the students are developing a task by working in
groups. Although most of my activities involve cooperative learning, I will be mainly
using Mrs. Cruz classroom.
The students

2. Learning Goals
The goals for this unit are based on the Content and Standards and grade
level expectations of the English curriculum for first grade students. The
majority of my students have not performed satisfactory in the English Class. I
have to develop objectives and goals were my students meet the grade level
expectations. I will be incorporating exercises that are similar to the “Pruebas
Puertorriqueñas”, in order for my students to start acknowledging the different
types of exercises. I will also have to include lots of visuals in order to reach my
special need students. I would also have to include lots of repetition drills to
support the students with language difficulties.
These are my learning goals for the phoneme unit:

3. 1. The students will be able to develop and demonstrate phonemic awareness in
order to identify short vowel sounds. (L/s 1.2)
2. The studetns will develop auditory discrimination to identify distinctive short
vowel sounds. (L/S 1.2)
3. The students will identify short vowel sounds in other to decode words and
phrases
fluently. (R.1.1)
4. . Uses phonemic awareness strategies to manipulate short vowel sounds and
form new monosyllabic words. (R.1.2)
Assessment Plan
For this unit I will use different worksheets that aim to identify the short
vowel e sound. For short vowel e sound the post test and pretest are different. I
will be treating the short vowel e sound in monosyllable words as well as an
integration of the short vowel e sound using a literature context. Also short vowel
sound e will be assessing in terms of identification of similar phonograms.
Day Activity Goals
Day 1 Short vowel e sound 1, 2,
introduction /pretest
Day 2 Short vowel e sound in 1,2,3
literature context
Day 3 Short vowel e sound in 1,2
phonograms.
Day 4 Short vowel e sound 1,2, 4
building sentences

4. Day 5 Short vowel e sound post- 1,2,3,4
test
Design for Instruction
The pretest showed me that my students know how to identify the short
vowel e sound but they do not have enough background knowledge to make
monosyllable words with short vowel e. When I produce the sounds of the words
they were able to identify if the words contain the short vowel but when they had
to make the sounds by themselves it became challenging for the majority of the
students. This is the mayor reason why I incorporated literature reading in the
unit. I had the students read aloud the short story Get the Tent which
emphasizes in reproducing the short vowel e sound. While the students were
engaged in the reading activity they were able to identify the words with this

5. particular sound as they read collectively and individually. I also decided to include
phonograms because while working with this skill the students a different overview
of the sound. I consider that since during a phonogram lesson the aim is to
recognize the words that rhyme they will be unconsciously reviewing the short
vowel /e/ sound. The same ideas goes along with sentence building, this technique
is develop using short vowel /e/ sound words but with a focus on sentence building.
Basically all of the activities revolve around the sound aimed for development from
an abstract form. The student will be engage in different activities where they
can review the sound in different types of context. I consider that this is
relatively important because it gives the students the opportunity to grasp and
differentiate the sound.
Detailed lesson:
Day 1: Unit introduction, pretest, short vowel e recognition.
Day 2: Identification and Recognition – a reading activity in which the students will
identify the short vowel e sounds presented in the short story.
Day 3: Phonograms Activity: Identifying phonograms with short vowel e
sound.

6. Day 4: Sentence Building – The students will create sentences using monosyllables
of short vowel e sound.
Day 5: Unit posttest
Instructional Decision Making
The first time I had to adjust my instructional plan was during the pretest.
The activities that I gave the students as an introduction of the vowel sound were
effective. The problem started when I gave the students the pretest assessment.
I had included only pictures of words with short vowel but these pictures were not
identified. For a 25% of the student this was not an issue. On the other the 75%
of the students had an inconvenience of recognizing short vowel sound in a simple
listening activity. For the majority of the students it becomes easier if they can
relate picture and text. Due to this fact I had to change my whole assessment
plan because I used pictures instead of text for the handouts and posttest. I had

7. also had to identify the pictures from the phonograms lesson with the
corresponding text. Basically I had to align all of the handouts to picture text in
order to make them more user friendly for the students. Since my aim was for the
students to achieve auditory discrimination for the post test was based on
auditory discrimination.
Analysis of Student Learning