Starting to make progress

So on thursday I mentioned how difficult it was for me to talk to some of the students and connect with them because I felt like it wasn't my place or I didn't know what to say. Unfortunately that observation period I didn't get much opportunity to connect with any of the students as the type of classes I was observing the student's attention needed to be focused on their work and it didn't feel right to distract them from it.

However I went to CF on Monday and observed the period 4 class of Kim (this will be the class I'm going to be teaching) and I felt like I made a lot more progress. They were reading "To kill a mockingbird" and Kim let me sit in with a group. There was a student who Kim admitted was a bit of a troublemaker who didn't like doing his work. I asked him if I could read on with him while the class read aloud together. He said yes and we read together. When I noticed he was getting distracted I made a few gestures to get him back to reading which worked and we didn't have many problems. When we were done and the group had to do their dialectical journals I helped him, and the rest or the group, out with figuring out where everything needed to go. I was shocked that he actually asked me for help with figuring out what to write for the reflection portion. I asked him what he thought it meant, he told me, and then I asked him why he thought that and we were able to come up with a pretty decent reflection for his journal. Lastly I was able to work with the group on their exit slips and when they asked me to help them (the question was something like name 3 things about a particular character in the book) I asked them questions to remind them of things we just read and pushed them to go deeper with the things they were writing about said character. I'm aware that this was only one day and only for a small amount of time but I feel like I made a lot of progress with communicating with the students.