Writing Day 2 Reflection

·         What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson. 

·         Students learned that scenes create a picture in the reader’s head. They learned to include dialogue and details about their characters or their scene in order to make their readers understand what they are trying to convey. I noticed that some struggled with generating dialogue that actually made their story move forward. Their dialogue was just a conversation that could be had anywhere and about anything rather than one that gives their audience insight into their story or their scene. All students were able to include details in their stories; however, some had a lot more description than others and I will continue to work with them to include more as we move along. I collected the students’ work and wrote remarks in all of their journals after asking them if I had their permission to do so, they all obliged. I gave them areas to add details that seemed logical to me and I am hoping this will give them a starting point by asking my who, what, where, when, why questions that may appear in their margins depending on the student.

·         What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?

·         Alternately, the students who did not have the appropriate amount of details or dialogue that furthered their story may have simply not had enough time. Our writing block is limited to 40 minutes and even though I strive to keep my launch under 12 minutes, the students do not have a long duration to write independently. Today my launch was ten minutes long and the students were able to write on their own for approximately 13 minutes without being interrupted. Their products for today may not indicate that they do not know how to add details and dialogue, but that they were not given ample time to apply the strategies. This is why we are continuing to work on their scenes tomorrow and I will be looking for improvement to better inform me of where students stand in their understanding of the strategies.

·         What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

·         I learned that some students are aware of how to appropriately use quotations marks, while others are still struggling with that. I will focus on these grammatical errors when we come to the editing stage of their pieces. Also, during our sharing time I learned that the students truly know how to speak to one another in a mature and respectful manner. Each group was asked to share a passage from their table that they thought met my objectives of using dialogue and vivid details well. They would share the piece and state that they were proud of their peer because he or she tried very hard to paint a picture, or they knew ____’s story was great because when _____ read it they felt like they were there. I was proud of their reactions and ability to point out what I am looking for which lead me to believe that they were actively listening during my launch and instructions.

·         When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

·         I have placed their revised pieces on their desks for them to look over as morning work and to make appropriate changes or additions. They will be able to do this in order supplement the lack of time for writing in the afternoons. After looking at their scenes today I noticed that all of them could at least demonstrate an understanding of details through their sentences and they incorporated dialogue at least once in their scenes as well. I do not feel that re-teaching the material is necessary, but I do think it needs to be constantly reinforced. I will be continuing to call attention to details and dialogue during reading instruction, read aloud, and writing times. Also, tomorrow’s lesson will be focused on allowing them to continue their scenes and this will give them the opportunity to add the strategies into their stories.

·         If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

·         If I were to teach this lesson again I would strive to provide the students with more time and instead of focusing my time on a few students when they raised their hands to ask for help I would make a stronger effort to circulate the room to conference briefly with many students. This would improve the students’ learning by allowing them all an opportunity to ask questions and receive input from me on their stories and areas for improvement.

·         What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?

So far I have been able to keep my mini-lessons short, but I want to shift my focus a little to ensure that I am striving to reach my goal of conferencing as well. I will continue to keep my launches concise and direct, but during their independent writing time I am going to make a better effort to move throughout the room and read as many pieces as possible. 

Writing Day 1 Reflection

·         What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson. 

·         During the lesson students learned how to summarize their scenes that they are going to write. I used examples from our Read Aloud book and a teacher written piece to demonstrate a scene and then changed it into a summary that was right to the point and concise. They pointed out that the summary just told the important part (they are working on determining importance in reading and applied this knowledge here). There were three students who struggled when it came to writing their summary sentences. They began writing their scenes without taking the time to write the sentences as directed. To correct this I am going to ask them to work on the sentences during our Read Aloud time tomorrow.

·         What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?

·         Alternately, the students who did not follow directions may have felt that the summary sentences would not benefit them as much as getting their ideas on their paper would. This could be more helpful to them in their story writing process while the summary sentences would only slow them down.

·         What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

·         I learned that many of them are very creative and have stories that I was not expecting. For example, one of our tier three intervention students completely followed the directions and met my objectives for the lesson while using a great story arc. She is breaking her story into manageable pieces and I look forward to reading the rest of her work. Many of the students in tier three interventions are excelling during writing block because the lessons are very direct and ask for only one aspect of writing to be focused on during each. This has helped all of the students keep their writing on task. I was also impressed by their stamina because I did not see a lot of wandering eyes during today’s lesson.

Also, during our sharing time I changed my lesson plan on-the-fly and asked the students to exchange their notebooks with the person sitting next to them for their partners to grade. The partners were instructed to look for punctuation, capitalization, and to predict what the scene was going to be about based on their summary sentence. I demonstrated some non-examples of how to critique a classmate’s work and then asked them to give me positive examples. They then shared and I asked for volunteers to tell me about what they think their partners stories were going to be about and then checked with their partners to see if they were on the right track. This was a smooth transition as well and I was very happy with the change in my plans.

·         When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

·         Based on my observations the students understood the meaning of the lesson and how to summarize, but the ones who failed to do so were those who did not follow directions. Those students will be asked to work on these sentences during Read Aloud tomorrow.

·         If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

·         If I were to teach this lesson again I would write my own story with a vivid scene that was turned into a summary instead of the one my MT had previously written. I selected to read hers because she wanted me to stick with the story that they were familiar with, but in my own room I would really like to implement my own stories to demonstrate my understanding of the concepts and lessons to my students. This would show them my interests and motivation to learn as well; I could lead by example. Using my own writing would improve the students’ understanding because they would be able to have more examples of what I am looking for and would motivate them to strive for the best as I am.

·         What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?

I learned that in order to stick to a mini-lesson format I must be concise and well-organized in order to keep the lesson actually mini. Today went well because I had my examples pre-selected and the anchor chart previously made, but I know that if I were fumbling for these things or my words that the lesson would have been too long. In order to continue my professional learning I plan to keep the routine that I have started of writing myself small notes on sticky  notes about what the main points I need to hit during my lesson are and being very organized to ensure a good flow the lesson for the students and myself. 

Week 7 PD

Chapter 11 – Summarizing and Synthesizing Information

            I would say the biggest take away from this chapter is the way in which we can allow students to display the most important information and merge it with their experiences. Students should be able to use brief retellings, can tell new information they have learned, and can ask good questions to help interpret new info.

            Summarizing and synthesizing can greatly benefit from using authentic learning opportunities. Students who can make connections from new material and explain how it relates to their lives provides a great opportunity to make learning a personal activity. Creating a close relationship between a new topic and a student opens new routes for them to develop a deeper understanding. Retelling a story can provide an authentic learning opportunity when the student reads a book of great interest and contains information they are familiar with. Having a student retell information about a passage they are uninterested in and unfamiliar with will result in a very poor retelling.

Chapter 14 – Reading to Understand Textbooks

            I think the biggest take away from reading this chapter is that we teachers have a large amount of knowledge and are familiar with many of the topics covered in a textbook. We also are very good readers and have used strategies for decoding the information that is conveyed through textbooks. The students we are teaching have no idea what they are doing. We need to keep this difference in mind as we work through a textbook with them.

            One of the best ways to help students learn the material from textbooks is to “front-load” the students with information about the text before beginning. Making connections from the lives of the students to the subject matter is critical in building their foundation to learn from. Whenever covering new material from a textbook, we must bring up the prior knowledge and background experience of the students to help them begin to make connections.

Strategies that Work Jigsaw - Week 7

Since we recently shifted from making connections to determining the importance of a piece of writing I decided to read chapter 10 from Strategies that Work. The authors cite the following to be important to call attention to while reading and teaching strategies, “fonts and effects, words and phrases, illustration and photographs, graphics, text organizers, and text structures” (p. 158-159). This was interesting to me because thus far we have been asking the children to find the important aspects of the task without the help of those clues. I am not sure if there are plans to incorporate these strategies, or draw attention to them, but after reading this chapter I have decided to mention them to my MT to see if she would like to use any of them. They seemed obvious after reading them, but for some reason we did not think of them before. The main takeaway from this chapter was that the students will need to be able to read in order to comprehend so that they are not only reading, but taking something away from the reading. Also, the students should be taught strategies rather than setting them free and expecting that they will “just know” what to do when they come to important parts of the text. To offer authentic learning opportunities in the classroom using the strategy of determining importance I hope to use a piece of writing that would interest the students or give them the chance to gain something that is meaningful to their lives from the reading. For example, using articles from the National Geographic mini-magazines the classroom receives will give the students information about animals that they will later encounter during our Big Zoo lesson. This will give them information to draw upon at a later time and get them excited for the zoo lesson. Reading about varying cultures will also open the students’ eyes to their surroundings, or lives that they have had little exposure to in order to make them more understanding and aware citizens.

 

For my second article I read the chapter focused on Reading for Understanding in Social Studies and Science. This was a chapter that I was interested in reading because Social Studies and Science are my favorite subjects, yet we do not see them often in the elementary setting. This is something I would like to change as I develop professionally by incorporating texts that focus on Social Studies and Science particularly because, "content literacy gives kids the tools to learn information, ideas, and ways of thinking in a variety of disciplines" (p. 218). I want to use these pieces of text to correspond with CCSS criterion that has a heavy emphasis on informational text. The main takeaway I took from this chapter was that reading content pieces can be done in multiple ways that will fit into various aspects of a curriculum. Additionally, the variety of disciplines leads for the students to have experiences with multiple texts to widen their depth of knowledge and how to apply that to everyday life using comprehension strategies that they are equipped with. Authentic instruction would be similar to the above pieces of text (animal articles and cultural insights) and finding pieces that interest the students based on their particular areas of study that motivate them. There are several students in my classroom are interested in geography and this has been something that I have been working to feed as I have taken more and more of a lead in the classroom. The class uses daily clues that can be further researched when the children get a chance and then the place is revealed on Fridays. 

Authentic Questions on Reading Strategies

In this weeks Strategies That Work readings Harvey and Goudvis talk about what makes an authentic question (pg. 124). They also discuss in Chapter 9 different questioning reading strategies. Below are some authentic questions I created for you to answer that pertain to questioning reading strategies.

Please pick a couple questions below and share your thoughts and ideas!

Should certain questioning reading strategies be introduced before others?
Do some questioning strategies work better at different grade levels?
How do I get my students to see how questioning works while reading?
How do I get my students to understand the importance of questioning strategies?
Do you see questioning reading strategies in your classroom? If so, explain?
Do you like some reading strategies better than other? Why?