This week I read chapter 22 in the Guiding Readers and Writers book by Fountas and Pinnell. The part I thought was most important were the different kind of sorts, depending on what the student is struggling with. The sorts are word work activites that can help with spelling, vocabulary, and in turn help with reading. I think these types of activities would be beneficial to ELLs. Especially the picture, letter, and word sorts. They can also be beneficial to the mainstream students. Some sorts that can be used on these students are: blind, speed, open, and closed sorts.
Today we got to finish watching our professor's lesson plan he did with a fourth grade class. It was a neat and fun way to watch someone teach personification in the way that he did. The whole lesson was good, but I'm going to specifically talk about how he introduced and engaged the students.
He of course started his lesson with the essential question. In the EQ, the word personification was in there. This was the first time they had been exposed to the word so he pulled up the definition. The dictionary definition is really long and complex for fourth graders, so he decided to help them define it in a different way. His new definition of personification was something along the lines of, "Something acting as if it was a person on a vacation." How cool is that?! We know personification as a nonhuman thing having human characteristics, but the way it was presented to these fourth graders was brilliant to me! From then on you can see the students were engaged throughout the whole lesson. Great job Mr. Flores! Today, two of my colleagues demonstrated a Prefix Mini Lesson. I liked how short and to the point it was. They introduced the content, then told us the strategies used to identify the prefixes. These two strategies were: it comes at the beginning of the word and it changes the meaning of a word. We were then in groups and did a differentiated activity; some groups just sorted examples and non-examples of prefixes, others sorted the words and figured out the meaning of the prefix, another group sorted, figured out the meaning, and came up with sentences using the words.
I read chapter 9 from the Guiding Readers and Writers textbook, and the overall idea of the chapter was about the first 20 days of independent reading, and getting your students ready for it. I didn't think you would have to get students ready for reading on their own, but it's more to it than that.
In class, we got to practice administering a Running Record test. I see my CT doing these in class and thought I'd be able to do it the first time I tried. That was not the case; there are so many marks you have to remember to put down whether the student hesistates on a word, or says a word wrong then corrects themselves, or even going back to reread a line. The recording of the student reading was going to fast for me to mark on the paper. Luckily, it was played for a second time and I was able to follow along a lot better.
On another note, I observed my CT administering a DRA to one her students on Wednesday. With the DRA, it asks a couple questions before the reading takes place. One of the questions it asks is "Who reads with/to you at home?" The student unfortunately answered with "No one." I was so sad at that point. It's no wonder she's reading at a level 4 in the first grade when she should be somwhere around a 13 I believe. Parents read with your children at home! In today's class we had two really good discussions; one about ELLs getting the proper education and the other regarding standardize tests.
My concern with ELLs is what made the school systems integrate students who don't speak English into an English speaking classroom? Someone made a comment about they didn't want to segregate anyone, which is understandable, but from what I've seen, they aren't learning as much as they could if they were in their native language. And that's the goal, to have them learn as if its being taught in their native language. Which makes it difficult, because its not being taught in their native language. This also doesn't allow them to socialize as much as well as relating to topics. It's just overall tough. The other discussion came from a reading we were assigned to read, and it mentioned standardized tests. The problem with these tests, is that a lot of teachers teach to the test and not genuinely. Teachers' pay is based on how well their students do on these tests, so that might be why they teach to it. In our class discussion, some people think you should just teach how they would normally teach, and some understand why they would teach to the test. I plan to teach it genuinely Today's class in Intermediate Literacy was pretty cool. We met in our PLC groups to discuss the readings we've done in the Strategies that Work book. Then, two students taught a lesson, one in a Kindergarten classroom and the other in a fourth grade classroom. They were both two different grades but the same overarching idea, which was Visualization. I really enjoyed their lessons!
In Kindergarten, she read a passage with descriptive characteristics of a "Green Giant" and we had to illustrate what we visualized. In the fourth grade lesson, the teacher read a story to us without showing us the pictures, this was hard for me to deal with, and asked us to draw what we visualized. She then read the story again, this time showing us the pictures. After reading the book a second time, we discussed what the book was actually about based on the pictures in the story. I thought they did a really great job! The first time I heard teachers aren't allowed to give spelling tests anymore I thought to myself, "Well how do children learn to spell?" I feel that back in elementary school, spelling tests every Friday is the reason I was able to read and write. When I'm in my interning class, I see so many of the students struggling to spell words right as they're writing. It was hard for me to tell them good job, when they spelled "because" as "bcus." Although, because is a pretty difficult word to spell in first grade, I just felt wrong giving them the assertion that "because" is spelled as "bcus." When do you tell them that it is wrong?
In this chapter, we learned all there is to now about spelling inventories. Teachers aren't allowed to give spelling tests, but they are suppose to be giving spelling inventories. The difference is that tests gives the students time to study the words and be tested on them afterwards; inventories have the students initially spell the words and teachers analyze spelling patterns to determine instruction. I haven't seen this in my classroom, that might be why they struggle with writing.
The overall message in this chapter was to provide a variety of texts in the classroom. For example, short texts, long texts, fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, magazines, etc. When students' interests are displayed in books, they are more likely to become those engaged readers we would like them to be. Which in turn, helps comprehension. |
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April 2014
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