Literacy #7

This chapter on assessment seems oddly familiar. It seems like we talk about this all the time in all of our classes. I am starting to pay less attention to the importance of it because it is overly emphasized. BUT, that is not to say that I don't think that it is important. It has been the part of the lesson I have struggled with from the beginning. I have to learn to keep in mind that this lesson is not for me. It doesn't matter if I feel like I have done a good job with the lesson or have come up with something new and creative. It only matters that the students take something away, and how else can I know that except through assessment?!? So we test them and test them and test them. Something that I have really started to get on board with is letting them assess themselves some, too. I have heard some great ideas recently on how to make this work. Here they are in bullet form so they are a little more accessible...

- Have them tape record themselves reading aloud, then later in the year let them come back to the recordings and analyze how they have grown, record again, how can they continue to grow?
- (from the LEARN NC guy) have them create a rubric for you to grade them with on rubistar. This gives them the power as to what they are being graded on and lets them know what they need to work on. Also, let them grade themselves on this same rubric to give you an idea of how they feel they are doing.
- Every 9 weeks (or more frequently) have them fill out an evaluation for themselves. What is their favorite part of reading? What do they not like to do? How can they improve? What are they best at doing? What is their goal for the next 9 weeks? etc.

Any other ideas as to how they can assess themselves?

Observations about ELLs

Unfortunately, I have not seen strategies in my classroom that are aimed at helping ELLs. I am in a fourth grade class, and all of our ELLs are fluent in English at this point. They are no longered pulled out for services. I think there is a push in ESL teacher, but this is on Thursdays when I am not there. I would like to see more, but it is not really necessary in my classroom, and if it is still necessary, these strategies are absent.

Strategies for ELLs

I think I have learned quite a few ideas from the discussions we have had so far. Here they are in list form

- label EVERYTHING
- make sure to have pictures and words to help them figure out through context
- make things interactive so they have a chance to take part in what they are learning
- repetition
- speak slowly (but don't make them feel stupid)
- repetition
- give clear directions and provide written directions
- have them repeat what they are supposed to do back to you
- give them lots of time to formulate a response before expecting an answer
- do not call on them to answer a question without some warning
- repetition
- assess in ways that do not test just their English skills
- give them opportunities to revise their work
- give them lots of feedback on what they are doing well and suggestions for how to improve
- push them to do their best
- have high expectations
- and lastly, repetition

Literacy #6

I remember once hearing about a teacher who asked he students to honestly answer this question: During independent reading time last year, did you ever pretend like you were reading when you really weren't? I thought that this was such an interesting thing to ask students, and I decided that is something I would like to use in my own classroom. But then... I thought about it some more. If the students admit to pretending to read, what am I going to do to fix this in my class? Why would I be any different than previous teachers? I found ch. 5 in Literate Lives and ch. 2 in Growing Readers to be very helpful in coming up with ideas to address this question.

Immediately, the thing that jumped out at me in ch. 5 was the idea that "reading and writing are not silent activities." Students don't like having to sit still and be silent any more than I do. How can I expect them to gain anything if they are not interested in silent reading. At Haw River this week, I had such a positive experience with my literacy lesson. I was only working with one student, but our discussion was far from silent. We read the story Mean Soup by Betsy Meritt together and acted it out.

"... Then, taking a breath, she screamed into the pot. 'Your turn,' she said. So Horace got on a stool and screamed, too. His mother screamed louder. Horace growled and bared his teeth..." These are few lines from the book that we acted out together. We pretended to be screaming into a pot. We got up onto a chair and screamed some more. We growled and showed our teeth. He picked up so much more vocabulary because we were able to show it to each other. I could see how excited he was about the story, and I really felt like he enjoyed reading because of the activity involved with the reading. Reading can't always be silent. I think he will come away from yesterday enjoying to read that much more because he wasn't sitting alone and being asked to be quiet. I noticed throughout the day that he also had a lot of trouble sitting still. The way the teacher would scold him every now and then made me realize that he probably gets in trouble a lot for not being still. He would gain so much more from reading if it is made into something active for him to do.

I realize, however, that we can't plan an activity for each individual student, and they do need to be reading on their own. I recognize the important of a read and share. I liked the idea of a reading conference as well as sharing with a partner. I was very impressed in ch.2 by the students who groan when reading time is over because they have run out of time. What a wonderful problem to have. I hope that I can engage my students that much that they don't want a lesson to end.

There is a student in my placement who really likes to draw. He has checked out a book that teaches how to draw dinosaurs that he keeps with him at his desk. Every day, he asks if he can look at this during independent reading time, and every time he is told that he needs to be reading a chapter book. Obviously, he can't read from this art book every day; he does need to learn to look at different kinds of text, but it really saddens me that he is never allowed to read this one. I would like to encourage him to use this once a week or after he has read a chapter in his chapter book, etc.

I still don't feel like I have a full grasp on what should be used to make independent reading the most beneficial that it can be for the students, but I think that these chapters and my experiences this semester have really helped me to start answering the question.

Science Blog #6

This experience in the classroom was way more positive for me and for the students than when I did the bubble experiment in second grade. I still did not feel like there was a real purpose for the experiment, but it had a more logical beginning, middle, and end. We opened the experiment by asking what would happen if we jumped off of a cliff. They responded with, "we would crack our heads and die." Then, we showed them a video of people parachuting off of a cliff, and we asked why they didn't crack their heads. They recognized that it was because of the parachute. We asked if they thought the parachute would speed up or slow down the fall. They originally said that it would speed up the fall, so we tested it. We dropped a plain clothespin and a clothespin with a parachute at the same time. The one without the parachute hit the ground much faster than the other one. They then changed their thoughts and said a parachute slows people down. They recognized that it was better to fall slowly so you don't get hurt.
I found that the most difficult part of the experiment was that the students were not very talkative. I'm not sure if some of them were ELL's, but whatever it was, they were very quiet. This made the inquiry part of this lesson very difficult. When we do this again, I might suggest that the teacher make groups to where there are students who are more likely to participate mixed in with the more quiet students. I would also give the students more of a chance to be involved with timing the experiment so that they could see how the timer works. I don't think we covered what the time meant with much detail.
I think that this experiment was way easier to conduct with students, and I think it gave them more of an opportunity to explore for themselves. I did find that less students had background knowledge on parachutes than they did on bubbles.

Science Blog #5

The line that really sums up what UDL is (in the article we had to read for last week: Smart from the Start…) the one that says, “…UDL is startingly simple: Think about the needs of the entire range of learners who are or could be in today’s classrooms, and then design curricula, materials, methods, and environments that support and challenge each learner as appropriately and consistently as possible.” Basically, UDL refers to what we have been learning in the SOE all along. We have to take the needs of each individual student into consideration when planning our lessons. UDL seems to refer more to the preplanning of all of our lessons to fit these needs based on what our students potential needs could be. It is absolutely impossible to do this ahead of time. Even if we plan our lessons to fit every mental, physical, emotional, and learning disability that has ever existed, we could still easily exclude the needs of our prospective students. I think that UDL is really only useful when we have an idea of what the needs of our actual students are, and then we work to design the curricula, methods and environments to suit their needs. However, I can do small things ahead of time to ensure that the first few weeks of school meet everyone’s needs before I have gotten to know them. I can set up the classroom in a way that is accessible to everyone (including wheelchair access) in both physical space and in atmosphere. I can make sure to write up directions in large print and to speak slowly and clearly to give students different ways to access the directions. I will take time to get to know the students and to talk with their parents about what they have noticed that has helped their student succeed. I will ask the students what they need. From here, I will incorporate as necessary. There is no need to make extra work for myself trying to accommodate every possible need when I will know what the specific needs of the group of students I do have are. I haven’t really observed anything that specifically would be considered UDL practice in my classroom this semester, but a few years ago I was in a classroom where there was a student who had really poor vision. He needed glasses and large print to be able to see the text. The teacher made copies of everything they would be reading for the day and enlarged the copies so the student could read it. My only confusion with UDL is the difference between this and differentiation? I think it is incredibly important to teach in way that accommodates all students’ needs, but what is so important about UDL specifally?

Literacy #5

This weeks readings talked about the different methods of teaching. I was really interested to revisit the concepts of top-down and bottom-up literacy. I think that the most important gift you can give to students is to make them responsible for their own literacy. When they have the power to decide how they will build the skills they need to be competent readers, they are more likely to develop those skills with confidence and thorough understanding. I have seen in my class room both top-down and bottom-up literacy occurring at the same time. My teacher gives them a lot of independence and autonomy in their reading selections and timeline for reading. She also assigns a lot of writing assignments that give them the opportunity to decide what they want to write about. However, she does also focus a lot on preparing them for the EOGs, so most of their guided reading aims to teach them the basic skills needed to ensure that they are successful on the standardized testing at the end of the year. This is an approach that I am still uncomfortable with because I remember being taught to take the test, and I remember hating it. It did not instill in me a love for reading. My parents and local librarians really helped foster my independence in literacy by letting me pick out books I loved. I also wrote stories and made up plays which helped me to feel more confident in reading and writing. It was because of this, that I did well on the EOGs, not because of the Blast-off curriculum they were using at the time. To this day, I still cringe when I think of the front cover of those workbooks with the rocket blasting off, but I remember fondly the summer reading packets from the local library.

Special Needs Professional Observation Reflection

Carmen and I had already planned to observe in the EC teacher's classroom, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and keep our observation date. We observed a very interesting type of classroom. The school has two kinds of pull out for students with special needs. Students that have more special needs are pulled out of their regular classrooms for reading, writing, and math to work with the EC teacher. Students whose needs aren't as great are pulled out of their regular classroom into an inclusion classroom. This means that the teacher for this group pulls out typically developing students as well as students who need that extra help. The idea is to keep the students included in the classroom while also giving them more opportunity for individual attention.

When we observed this inclusion classroom, the teacher was working with a group of 8 fourth graders. She divided them into two groups. One worked with her on guided reading while the other did independent reading. She explained to us that the groups were a mix of EC students, ELL's, and typically developing students. She gave us the break down of each group before the students entered the room. Carmen and I talked about it afterward and realized that neither of us had any idea which students were the EC students. We had tried to narrow it down by picking out the obvious ELL's and then trying to determine between the typically developing and the EC students. That is what is really beneficial about this inclusion classroom because, though it may be a little more obvious to the students than they seemed to register, they all worked together as if they were working on the same level.
The teacher noted that she is having to balance several different reading levels with this group of students since their learning process are at such different stages of development. I would guess that she has to work even harder to differentiate the curriculum than their regular classroom teachers. I saw several techniques of differentiating that she used while we were there, and they were done in a way that none of the students really noticed that they were working on different levels. She began the guided reading working with the whole table, but then she had the students keep reading from the book while she turned her chair to each one to ask them to read aloud with her. Each student had something different they needed to work on to improve their reading. One boy was struggling with fluidity and timing when reading aloud, so she pulled out a piece of white paper and had him cover the lines he was not reading at that moment so he could focus just on the line he was reading. This helped him a lot. She also had him read it again and again until he could read it confidently. Another thing I noticed with this particular student was that she never told him when he did something wrong. He read "said he" as "he said," and she actually told him that it was ok for him to read it incorrectly as long as it didn't change the meaning. I thought this was a great tactic for helping to build his confidence and teaching him that we don't have to read perfectly to be great readers.

A few challenges I could see for this classroom would mostly deal with classroom management. The students come into the room at different times depending on when their classroom teachers have finished a lesson and can send them. This makes it difficult for the teacher to start the lesson on time and to make sure all of the kids are receiving the same instruction. Also, there is a different system of behavior management. If the students are only spending 45minutes to an hour in this room three times a week, it could be difficult for them to see any correlation between the behavior management here and the behavior management in their regular classroom. This could be especially difficult for students with BED or ADHD as a lot of their learning depends heavily on the behavioral management plan of the teachers. This would be something the classroom teachers and the pull out teacher would really need to work together to figure out.

Overall, I think that what I gained from this experience was a better understanding of how to use inclusion in my classroom. It seems like such a daunting task to include students of different abilities, and we are only exposed to readings and other peoples experiences to try to teach us how to do it. We need to see inclusion being done well and really experience it for ourselves to be able to begin to understand how to plan for it in our own classes. I think that is what made this a meaningful experience for me, and I am glad I decided to observe the class even though the assignment was changed.

Science Post #4

Trying to figure out what my students’ understanding of scientific concepts still seems a little foreign to me. It also seems like a difficult thing to try to do. We haven’t had a lot of exposure to science when working with kids in our various placements over the past two years. All over the interactions I’ve had in science have shown me that teachers are not particularly interested in relating what they are teaching to what the children already know. They tend to begin a unit assuming that they don’t know anything about the topic, so they begin a lecture on all the things they want the students to learn. It all seems disjointed to me.
Going into the bubble experiment, I had a very similar expectation. I assumed that they would know nothing about surface tension, and to an extent I was right. I did not think about what they could connect this to, though. Really, they do have an understanding of surface tension that may not actually be linked to a specific concept. They have seen water pool together when it rains. They know that things can float on top of the water. They have most likely played with bubbles before. All of these are valuable pieces of knowledge that should be examined when thinking about what their conceptual understanding is. I think that by talking about conceptual understanding in an overly sophisticated way, we think that there has to be some sort of definitive knowledge base for the students to know anything about the concept we are trying to teach. That isn’t true. We have to understand what they know about anything and use that to our advantage when teaching them the more specific ideas and concepts. I think this is true in a lot of our education classes too, though. We are asked how we are going to assess what they know beforehand. We don’t have to come up with a formal assessment for this every time. Asking them what they know can be enough. Observing them goes a long way. I think we have to be careful to not get in the mindset that we have to have such involved forms of assessing them or that they must have a prescribed set of facts in their knowledge base to make their knowledge valuable.
With this being said, I think a lot of my understanding of what the students know will come from observing them in my classroom. I am teaching a unit on nutrition in the spring, so I can observe what decisions they make in the lunch room. By knowing my students, we will have talked about what their favorite foods are. I will also start the unit by asking them what they know. We will have an overarching question to help guide us throughout the unit (or maybe several) that help us to begin the discussion about what we know and lead us to learn more about the topic.

Literacy #4

Chapter 3

This reading reminded me a lot of the course work we had for 415 last semester. We talked extensively about the importance of knowing our children’s cultural background and what they are bringing to the classroom. I really enjoyed the term from this read “virtual school bags.” This refers to the “knowledges, skills and ways of being” that the children are carrying with them when they enter our classrooms. It is important for us to have an understanding of what is in these backpacks and to help them to unpack the bags to share what they bring with them with their students. By doing this, we can enrich what they already know, what they are learning, and what other students already know and are learning.
My experience with cultures outside of my own has occurred mostly outside of our country. I have travelled to places all over the world, the Middle East, Europe, Central America, South America, and Canada. In each of these different places, I have been able to experience the culture in a very authentic way. I have stayed with families in each of the different settings, I have observed the goings on of their daily lives, and I have acquired a deep understanding of who they are and how their culture has shaped them. Unfortunately though, I have not been given as many opportunities to see these cultures play out within American society. I think that it is important to know where the student’s culture originates, but there is also something to be said for knowing how these cultures function within the culture of the United States. The general tendency of culture is that it changes over time and relocation. Bringing cultures to the United States changes the nature of them almost immediately. This is important because the children (and/or their families) are really bringing in their backpack the original culture and how the culture has adapted to fit within the context of culture in the US.
What I still feel like I am lacking in regards to culture is the balance between the individual cultures (and by this I am referring to the culture in its original form) and the culture of the classroom. I hope to be able to weave all of my student’s lives together to form an atmosphere of multiculturalism, but I think that it will most definitely be a challenge for me.