Week 14 - Widzinski (Response)

Holly delivered the idea of differentiated instruction in a clear and positive manner. She did not single the child out, and assured the parents that she is changing her teaching methods to support the children in the class that are struggling. She provided examples for what she will be changing in the class and the different resources for the students. One thing I would like to know more of is how to support the student(s) outside of the classroom. I would also like to know how the progress of the students are going to be tracked to ensure that these methods of differentiated instruction are working. Also when you say you will be implementing a number of strategies, what do these include more specifically? What will the more advanced students be doing in the class during these times?

Week 14- McLean (response)

From the eyes of a potential parent, I understand that my child has made improvements from the start of the year.  It is reassuring to know that they have made some positive progress.  I also know that my child is struggling to make connections between the sounds and the letters of the alphabet.  I read that you, the teacher, believes in differentiated instruction and that you want to help my child.  It was helpful that you explained the term differentiated instruction so that I knew exactly what you were talking about.  In addition, I am under the impression that my child is not being singled out or are the only child struggling.  You made it clear that they are not alone and they are going to be provided help.  I also learned that his needs will be met in the classroom.  You made sure to say that he will be put in groups with students who have a similar skill level to him.  You said that this will help him improve his skills and feel less intimidated to gain these skills.  He will also have time to work one-on-one with the teacher and there will be less complex texts used with the students while these skills are being developed.  All these things were clearly communicated, however I still have a few main questions that need to be answered.  These include the following: What will you be doing specifically with my child to help them improve (such as strategies or techniques)?  How can I help them at home?

Week 14 - Harris (Initial)

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones,

Over the course of the school year thus far, Michael has shown definite improvement in regards to his literacy abilities. Michael's skills continue to improve, however, he seems to be struggling with recognizing connections between a few particular letters of the alphabet, and the sounds that they represent. The difficulty that he is experiencing poses a challenge for him when it comes to sounding out words when reading, and 'stretching words' in order to write them. Michael is not the only student in our class who is struggling with this. In order to combat this, I plan to engage in differentiating instruction, which involves responding to the variance among learners to ensure effective support for learning occurs in classrooms. This means, I will be implementing a number of different strategies during lessons and activities in order to cater to the different interests, and learning styles and rates of all students.

If I continue to provide generalized instruction to all students, I feel it would prove very counter-productive and overwhelming for students who require a bit more support. I recognize that, in order for Michael and the rest of the students in our class to be successful in regards to the various components of literacy, it is necessary for me to modify my teaching style. In order to best accomplish this, students will be put into groups with other students with a similar skill-set. This way, when students are working in groups, I will be able to provide each group of students with specific instruction that will benefit them the most based on the skills they are working to improve. Hopefully, this will also help to alleviate some of the intimidation that some students are currently experiencing while working in a group with students they are not yet fully compatible with. Also, I would also like to place more emphasis on individualized instruction. While students are working in their groups or pairs, I plan to provide one-on-one assistance to the individual students who I feel could benefit from it. This will allow me to assist students in improving individual skills to help them become more successful in regards to their overall literacy. Also, in order to further support Michael and the other students will similar skill-sets, I think it could be very beneficial to reintroduce less-complex texts until the desired skills are acquired. This way, reading will prove less daunting and overwhelming, and it will enable Michael to more easily recognize and identify the connection between letters and their sounds.

I am excited about implementing differentiated instruction in the classroom, and I am very hopeful that it will greatly benefit Michael, and the rest of the students in our class. If you have any questions or further suggestions, please contact me.

Thank you,

Holly Harris

McLean- Week 13 Writing Video

Video: Conversations Among Writing Peers

This video discussed how teachers allow their students to confer more independently by using a response strategy.  This strategy is called Receiving the Piece, where students are grouped in pairs, listen to each others’ writing, summarize what they’ve learned and comment on the writing.  It is important that the students get their work valued by their peers, not only the teacher’s perspective.

In the video, it was stated that it is important for teachers to create an environment for their students, as writers.  They need to make sure that students are listening to each other intently because every person's voice and writing matters.  In fact, one of the rules of Receiving the Piece is to listen with your whole heart and soul.  This also allows students to recall the information by telling it back to the writer.  The video stated that this step is important and most children actually light up after they hear their story read back to them.  They have learned that their words matter.  This is one method of creating a writing conversation among students/peers.   

Widzinski - Writing Video

Video: Writing Self-Assessment

The criteria the students are looking for: Why we're reading, author's point of view, why this should change, thoughtful consideration and to look at this as writers. The teacher read the story to the class and went through the checklist. Then they looked at it as writers instead of just a reader. She asked how they could tell. The students got sidetracked in thinking about their own homework, and tried asking the teacher for no homework. They then looked at a second example. The teacher went through the checklist again and gave examples, and then asked the students if they gave facts to back up the writers argument.

This was really looking at persuasive writing and to be able to have a checklist. I would have liked it more if the students each had a handout of the writing sample for themselves to look at while the teacher was reading. I also would have like to have seen more of the teacher asking the students for examples for each column of the checklist.

Widzinski Reading Lesson Overview

Reading Lesson Overview:

1.     My two students I am working with are Nate* and Amanda*. My MT and I went over their reading scores in different areas, and I chose them because their scores were the lowest. They struggled with comprehension the most. Because they struggled with comprehension, I wanted to read them a book and focus on the Common Core that related the illustrations to the events that took place in the story. I believe that this will help Nate and Amanda to comprehend the events by tying them into the pictures on the page.

2.     I read Briggs and Forbes article, Orientation to a New Book: More than a Picture Walk. This article provided good examples for questions to ask my target students prior to reading to get them oriented to the book. The examples they gave will help with Nate and Amanda’s overall comprehension of the text.

McLean Reading Lesson Overview

·       Discuss the target areas you have chosen for your lessons, and how you know your target areas are appropriate for these learners’ needs. You will need to access any assessments completed by you or your MT that help you understand the focus students’ learning needs and talk with your MT about appropriate strategies to use to support the focus students’ learning.

o    The target areas that I have chosen for my students are phonemic awareness and phonics.  These are both emergent literacy skills and can be found in Tompkins chapters 4-5.  My head teacher informed me that my focus students need extra help in these two areas.  One student in particular needs extra help here because he came late into Kindergarten and barley knew the names of the letters in the alphabet.  As you can imagine, he needs extra help coming up to speed with the Kindergarten standards.  As a result, he is one of my largest focuses during this lesson.  Other students need help with these areas and would benefit from one-on-one instruction.  I know that these target areas are appropriate for my students needs because my head teacher has done many assessments on my focus group of students.  She has been doing verbal assessments and written work sample assessments that she has shown me.  In specific, she has noticed that these students have trouble sounding out simple words, as well as blending words together.  They also have trouble recognizing the first sound in a word and understanding how changing this sound contributes to the meaning of the word.  For this reason, I am working on phonics and phonemic awareness activities with these children. 

·       Read at least one of the articles listed on our course schedule (March 25) (also listed on the back of this sheet) to assist you in selecting an appropriate focus and instructional strategy for each lesson.

o    There are several instructional strategies that one can use when teaching phonics and phonemic awareness.  However, I wanted to narrow my focus and teach these subjects as a center during literacy centers.  This is the most effective use of time, as my mentor teacher and I discussed.  As a result, I will be teaching a phonics literacy center one day and a phonemic awareness literacy center another day.  In my lesson on phonics, I will be playing a matching game that allows students to engage in discussion about the rhymes or phonic sounds in words.  I read the article, “Orientation to a New Book: More Than a Picture Walk” by Connie Briggs.  Although I am not engaging students in a reading lesson and furthering their comprehension strategies by encouraging students to “read” the pictures, the students engaging in my center activity will be using pictures to have a further understanding of the information.  The children engaging in the phonics activity will have to look at the picture cue to help them sound the word to determine if the words rhyme.  In addition, the children at the phonemic awareness center will be engaging in an activity that requires them to draw a picture referring to the word that they create.  In this way, they are using pictures to take control of their own learning and activate their piror knowledge, and therefore create motivation.  This is the type of strategy that I read about in this article, as well as learned from talking to my head teacher about, that I will be using in my activity center plans.   

Harris Reading Lesson Overview

·       Discuss the target areas you have chosen for your lessons, and how you know your target areas are appropriate for these learners’ needs. You will need to access any assessments completed by you or your MT that help you understand the focus students’ learning needs and talk with your MT about appropriate strategies to use to support the focus students’ learning.

        Before I began planning my two reading lessons, I introduced the assignment to my mentor teacher and we discussed which students could most benefit from small-group instruction, and what aspects of reading they struggle with the most. After reviewing students' literacy assessment scores, it was clear that a select few students really seemed to struggle the most with phonemic awareness and comprehension of text. These particular students tend to struggle with comprehending text due largely in part to the difficulties they experience with concentration and attention.

Reading Lesson 1 (Phonemic Awareness): The activity that I plan to implement with my focus group is a game of Bingo, with which they are all already familiar. However, I plan to customize the game so that each box on the Bingo boards contains a distinct picture of an object, with a clear label directly beneath it. When implementing the activity, I will say a letter sound (e.g., /k/) or a letter-combination sound (e.g., /ch/), and each child will look at their board and determine whether or not any of the pictures/words on their board begin with that particular sound. If so, they will place a marker in the designated box.

Reading Lesson 2 (Comprehension): The second reading lesson that I plan to implement with my focus group is a read-aloud. The book I plan to read to the students is "Just Saving My Money" by Mercer Mayer. The book is about a boy named 'Little Critter' who wants a new skateboard, and has to earn the money on his own. The comprehension questions that I plan to ask the students include: "Who was the main character in the story?" "What other characters do we meet in the story?" "What did the main character want to buy?" "What did the main character have to do in order to get what he wanted?" and "What did the main character learn?" Such questions will allow me to gauge how well the students understood and comprehended the content of the story.

·       Read at least one of the articles listed on our course schedule to assist you in selecting an appropriate focus and instructional strategy for each lesson.

The article that I chose to read was the Briggs and Forbes article "Orientation to a New Book: More than a Picture Walk". This article guided me in selecting an appropriate focus and instructional strategy for each lesson. The article provided several examples of effective questions to pose to focus students before beginning the text, in order to get them interested in the book, and focused. Through implementing these strategies and asking the questions suggested in the text, I am confident this will help my students more easily and thoroughly comprehend the text.

Week 12 - Harris (Response)

The mini-lesson Janine mentioned that could help support students improve their vocabularies involves breaking words down into their parts, and thinking about each individual portion, and where they recall seeing those portions in other contexts. I am not completely convinced that this method can be used consistently to the benefit of all students. It is unclear to me how students make connections and associations between the actual words and their meanings, what they represent, when they focus solely on the different parts of the word itself and their contexts other than in the term being learned. I agree that it is important to introduce primarily tier 2 words in ways that are authentic and meaningful to students, to help them comprehend and retain the associations between words and their meanings. According to the Scott article, "Teaching All the Children", frequent and consist exposure to certain words in context is often more beneficial to improving student vocabulary than rote learning.

Week 12- McLean (Response)

In response to the description of what a lesson plan should include, in terms of vocabulary, I would have to agree.  A lesson should help students learn vocabulary in a meaningful way by focusing mostly on tier 2 words.  For instance, having students memorize a word and its meaning is not very effective on its own.  However, if you have a lesson where you are reading a book, one important vocabulary word that you might want students to learn or focus on would relate to the book or the topic of the lesson.  This might be words like characters or setting, or excited or jealous.  These different types of words could be taught through a lesson to make it more authentic and create a scaffolded meaning behind each word.  This goes beyond relying on a dictionary definition of words.  Instead, students could even create their own dictionary by writing words and their own definition of what the word means based on the lesson that it relates to.  This would allow students to create a sense of meaning behind each vocabulary word learned authentically, as well as allow children to comprehend the word fully by restating the meaning of the word by using their own words.  As stated earlier, it is essential to include vocabulary development as an authentic activity to create meaning that is relatable for students.

Week 12 Initial Post - Widzinski

Thompson's text describes the tiers...

Tier One: Basic Words: Words that are used very commonly around the house/school/playground. A native English-speaker would rarely need instruction about the meanings of these words because they are so common. Examples: animal, guitar, celebrate

Tier Two: Academic Words: Words that are used more in writing than orally. Students will learn the words meanings from their application. Sometimes, students will understand the concept of the word, but not recognize the specific word. Examples: evidence, original, spirit

Tier Three: Specialized Words: Words that are content-specific/abstract. These words are used less frequently. Examples: osmosis, Great Depression, unions

Thompson states that teachers focus their word instruction on Tier 2 words, while still including words from all three levels on word walls. I agree with Thompson. I believe that a lot of the focus of teaching should come from Tier 2 words. I think that learning Tier 3 words come with time and from teaching specific content. I also agree that some Tier 1 words may need to be taught, like the example in the book (harmonica) because not all children may be exposed to the same things based on their lifestyles and therefore will have a different Tier 1 basic vocabulary. Word walls are definitely a tool I have seen in multiple classrooms, but have never taken the time to fully examine the word choices that are on the wall and what tier they might fall under.

In readings Winter's article, Interactive Frames for Vocabulary Growth and Word Consciousness, I really liked the idea of the triangle. The teacher drew an inverted triangle and broke their work up into the three parts (transported, trans-port-ed). This got the students thinking about all three parts of the word, and when they've heard those parts in other contexts. I think this task would work well for older children, but I think there are ways to make it more simple for younger grades.

Week 9- McLean

1.     Conceptual Understanding

a.     Learning about the new literacy of visual literacy helped to open my eyes to different teaching methods in my classroom.  Typically, literacy is taught by the words on a page, rather than by using illustrations, graphs, photographs, videos, etc.  Therefore, it is a strong contrast from the traditional literacies that are taught in schools.  I also learned several different ways that visual literacy can be easily incorporated into the classroom on an everyday basis, and in each area of the curriculum.  I also learned that there are different ways that this can be easily done for upper elementary and lower elementary.  Previously, I had only seen lower elementary students refer to illustrations in books to help them decode the text.  Now, I know that children can use graphs, videos, photographs, etc to explore the visual literacies available.  The digital literacy, Glogster, helped to inform my thinking by showing me a new resource that I could use to present information to my students and for students to use to present information to classmates and me.  This online poster supports the idea of visual literacy and how it can be used in the classroom too.  This is somewhat different from what I posted about in my original definition.  Although visual was included in my definition, I now have a more concrete idea of what it look like to include visual literacy in the classroom.  As one can see, I have grown from thinking that literacy is just communicating with others by using different methods of communication and text (online vs. print).  Using digital literacy, new literacies, and traditional literacies can all be combined to teach a complete understanding of literacy to students.  It is easy to combine and integrate all these different aspects to create a definition of literacy that teaches to the whole student in every aspect of their everyday life, in today’s world. 

2.     Classroom Implications

a.     Digital Literacy: Students will need exposure to different types of online literacies, such as websites, videos, photographs, etc.  This exposure to online literacies will allow students to grow in their knowledge of digital literacy.  However, students will also need a general understanding of how a computer works.  Teachers will need to ensure that students understand how to type, use a mouse, click on objects, and maneuver the information on their computer screen/website.  For my specific literacy, they would need a class devoted to learning how to use glogster and then have a guided instruction for creating a project using glogster, especially with lower elementary students.  By going step-by-step with the students, they will be able to better understand how to use the digital literacy and then use it to respond to information online and/or classmates information.

b.     New Literacy: Students need to develop an understanding for the importance of viewing visual literacy and how it can impact their learning.  This can be done by showing students how visuals can impact their learning, such as illustrations in a book or photographs of facial expressions to understand emotions, etc.  The students will need these types of supports at first, and scaffolding on how to interpret the visual information presented to them.  They will need to be taught terminology associated with visual literacy, art, media, etc, as well as information on how to interpret it, such as what to look for.  This can be done through teacher modeling at large group time and breaking off into small groups to practice with students.  The students would then get practice watching how to interpret visual literacy, practice with a partner, and then, after this, be expected to use this information to respond to visual literacy independently.  This could even be done by responding to a post on a website or in a class discussion.  This is how I would expect myself to introduce visual literacy to my students. 

Harris - New Literacies

1) YOUR CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING:

My conceptual understanding of literacy has definitely improved since beginning this class. Initially, my definition of 'literacy' largely revolved around what constitutes a literate person. This project helped me realize that 'literacy' and 'literate' are two very different things. One's exposure to a number of different forms of literacy aids them in the process of becoming literate. This project helped solidify in my mind that literacy is not limited to things that involve reading and writing, but also things that provoke language through internal thought as well as external verbalization. The development of my own digital literacy using Weebly helped me realize that technology can be incorporated to make virtually any lesson more effective. I am now more knowledgeable about the fact that, to provide early elementary students with exposure to literacy, I need not only use picturebooks, but may also refer to images, videos, and voice recordings to provoke internal thought and external verbalization of those thoughts. Reviewing my classmates' projects allowed me to briefly explore and becoming minimally familiar with a wide variety of technologies that I could incorporate into my classroom lessons in the future.

2) CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS:

As technology continues to advance, students' knowledge of and familiarity with the various forms of technology available increases. For this reason, as a teacher, part of my job will be to constantly be working to discover and familiarize myself with the forms of technology that my students are or will be using. However, it is doubtful that all students in the classroom will have equal exposure to all forms of technology that are used. Some students may not have any exposure at all to one or more of the forms. For this reason, I will need to walk all students through the process of navigating and manipulating the technology in order to introduce students to the technology who are unfamiliar with it, and also to review it with the students who are familiar with it. Once all students demonstrate that they have a descent grasp on how to operate and use the technology, I will begin to incorporate that particular form of technology into lessons. In specific regard to my project, I believe digital literacy is a very effective way to provide students with exposure to cultural literacy. On the Weebly site we created, we were able to integrate photographs and videos, maps, links, facts, and more, which would not be possible without the use of some form of technology. The incorporation and use of digital literacies in my classroom to help teach lessons will help my students become literate, in regards to language arts and technology.

Widzinski - New Literacies

1. Your conceptual understanding:
My ideas and thoughts of literacy has changed and enhanced dramatically over the 10 weeks in this class. What I am realizing more and more, and especially with this project, is that literacy is all around us. The thing that is so great is that we have the means to take the world around us, the literacy around us, and teach it in awesome, hands-on ways. I have also realized that there are so many forms of technology that I don't know how to do. I explored Julia's page and when I talked to her, she didn't even know how to use glogster, she just figured it out as she went along. This is something I need to take the time to do - explore different technologies so I feel comfortable one day incorporating them in my classroom. At the beginning, I was aware of cultural literacy and the basic definition, but after completing this project, I realized the depth of the literacy. It was awesome to find the resources that are available for teachers and students on cultural literacy. What really got me to this point in thinking about literacy was through our class discussions, and exploring this project.

2. Classroom Implications:
Providing effective literacy instruction to diverse learners will be a struggle. I believe that as each year passes with new diverse students, the ways in which I teach literacy will have to change to cater to each student. This is the big thing- to teach literacy effectively, you must know you students and their strengths and weaknesses. With this you can tailor the lessons to their developmental level and to their interests. In exploring cultural literacy, it has given me insight into knowing that I will be supporting all different cultures in my classroom, and that I will need to teach and represent them all in a positive manner. I want my students to explore digital literacies and try out different things with them. I plan to help them do this by providing them with all the resources I possibly can. I can do this by exploring different technologies on my own, teaching with them, and then giving the students the tools to use these digital literacies. For students to develop cultural literacy, I believe they need to go into each culture and idea with an open mind. This will also help kids start to recognize their own biases which is important to know as an adult, while teaching them and opening their eyes to different ways of life. I hope to provide support in teaching children about many different cultures in any way that I can. I hope to make my students as well rounded as possible by using cultural literacy in the classroom.