Struggling Readers... PC or accurate?

Reading through chapter 12 of the Flint text, I see over and over again the term struggling readers. It initially strikes me at an attempt at political correctness in describing students who are behind... the students that are not meeting the standards set up by the same political institutions that coined the phrase struggling students to describe students who aren't suceeding in their institution. Here is where I could easily go into a long, embittered discussion about the stressors lovingly known as standardized tests and AYPs, but I want to look at the other side of this term, struggling readers.

When I think struggling readers, I think of students who are not succeeding at reading, not necessarily at standards set out by the teacher, the school, or the state, but these are the students who are not reading as well as they are capable, and a lot of the time, they know it. Students can learn to love to read, but they have to pass the stage of struggling with it to be able to love it. Struggling readers lack confidence in reading because they are not as strong in some of the necessary skills as they need to be. BUT, I would argue that it is NOT their fault. Our jobs as teachers are difficult, and I doubt any one of us would argue otherwise, but we owe it to every struggling reader and succeeding reader alike to teach confidence and a love of reading in a way that benefits each reader.

At the end of this post, I have included a silly video with two "kids" in the library. It's not really related to this topic, but I think they are ridiculous with what they can do, so I am sharing. Also, I can make the connection that part of reaching out to every reader is reaching out to the interest of every reader! Maybe for these "kids" it's music, maybe for others like Rakwaun it's spiders, or even others, it's Black Beauty.

While I dislike the term struggling readers, because it places the blame on the students, I am grateful for this politically correct way to group the students we aren't reaching together. Hopefully, we can use this to remind ourselves to work to foster their learning in a way that DOES reach out to them.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lDWU2OBm6U

Literacy #9 and #10

Last week I was sick and, unfortunately, slept through writing my blog post, so I am writing this post in response to both chapter 11 and chapter 8...

As I was reading about Mr. Gallagher and Ms. Reiner's student, Sarah, and her interest in the History of Women's Rights, I was thinking about how lucky Sarah is to be in a classroom that has created such a wonderful atmosphere for inquiry-based learning. What has been irking me about inquiry-based learning since we started talking about it, is how little input the students are allowed to give in their own learning processes even in inquiry-based classrooms. Since we began studying how to implement inquiry-based learning in our lessons, I have really grown to appreciate the benefits of students exploring and taking responsibility for their own understanding. Inquiry-based learning seems to be a way more authentic way to completely grasp something. Even in college, I have found that the classes from which I learned the most were the ones that taught me how to think outside the box by letting me explore the topic myself. However, the key part of these classes that really helped me to love learning at a higher level, was that I was allowed to choose the topic about which I would explore and really learn. My experience with inquiry at the elementary level only exposed me to learning that the teacher decided what they would get out of inquiry. I'm not saying that this is a problem. I think that teachers are great manipulators. We can get children to learn and believe anything, and when we can do it without them knowing that we had a master plan behind it all, it's even better. BUT, what I think is missing (not at all times and in all situations of course) is the opportunity for students to take the inquiry skills they acquire through our predetermined inquiry-based lessons and use them to discover something completely for themselves. What I took away from chapter 11 is a hope (and goal even) for my classroom. I want students to feel comfortable to come to me with a topic they want to learn, and I want them to know that they should learn about it. They need to learn about it. Our one-size-fits-all curriculum doesn't really fit all. In the real world, we aren't all asked to know or learn the same things. They need to understand the basics (and learning to explore is definitely part of that) which is what the curriculum is trying to cover, but they need to take more responsibility for the "extras": the things the curriculum doesn't cover that are the things they really NEED to know.

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Wow... After writing my first part of the post, I was reading about Ms. Bell's class in chapter 8, and it's funny how well this connected to my thoughts on chapter 11. She made a realization that her students had their own interests and this should really be a part of literacy for them.
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I found chapter 8 to be really helpful because it gives so many helpful strategies for teaching intermediate readers and writers. My placement is in a fourth grade classroom, so I connect to this chapter way more than the previous ones about beginning readers. A lot of this chapter focused on word study and building vocabulary. I have noticed in my placement that the students of the highest reading group are learning new words through patterns and meaning. They look at the roots and branches of words and study how words are similar and different. The rest of the class doesn't seem to focus on learning words at all, outside of their weekly spelling tests. I struggle with knowing what to do with spelling at this age. The gap between the highest and lowest spellers in the class is huge. Should I be marking every word that the kids spell wrong? When they ask how to spell something, do I tell them to make up a spelling or is it time for them to actually know how to spell it?

Any ideas for how to improve spelling for the entire class?

Science Blog #8

Despite one of our group members being out sick and me not feeling so great either, our science lesson went way better than it did with the third graders. It helped that we did this as the last lesson of the day because the students were more accustomed to talking with us about their thought processes, and they really trusted us. We decided not to change many things about the experiment because we had a strong feeling that the lesson didn't go well before because of the group we were working with. They were all afraid to share their ideas and seemed intimidated by our presence in the classroom. We did add a prediction/results slip for them to fill out as pre- and post-assessment. We began with a video of parachuting, which they really enjoyed. Then, we had them make their first parachutes. We tested them, using an online timer, and wrote down the three test times. Since we were using an online timer, we let the students do the timing. We found this to be way more user friendly than the stop watches we used before, mostly because those buttons are way more difficult than a mouse for their little fingers. I think this helped reinforce the relationship between the time and how fast the parachutes fell. We then let them change one thing about their parachute and explained that this is the way real scientists test things. They changed one thing each and made a prediction on their slips about how the times would change. They tested them again and wrote down the three times. I showed them individually, while Megan helped others with testing their new parachutes, how to find the average. They did really well with this, and they even understood the importance of finding an average. They then had to write down what the results were on their slip. Did it fall faster? slower? etc.

The students that finished fastest were allowed to keep changing things. It was interesting to note that after they made that one change, we told them they could keep playing with their parachutes and could do whatever they wanted with them, and they kept changing one thing at a time and testing the parachute afterward. I think they really grasped the idea of how scientists tests things and having a control group (though we didn't talk about what a control group was, they understood the idea). Allowing the students to keep working was a great way to differentiate for the students who needed more of a challenge to keep experimenting while allowing us to help the students who needed extra. They enjoyed it, too!

My only question is, how do we take this and make it work for an entire class? It worked well in small groups because we could be there to observe all of the students and help all of them at the same time. I am just wondering what I could do to make this work with the whole class without losing the individual attention.

EC Resource for Differentiation

I picked out an article from the LearnNC website that I thought was really helpful for management in the classroom that also helps teachers prepare for all student's learning needs. "Managing a classroom with brain food" gives ideas as to how to make the management of the classroom easier so that the teacher can focus more time on watching students and interacting with parents.

Ideas it suggests:
- Community building activities from the beginning of the year: making the classroom as a community of trusting and responsible students, helps keep the students accountable to one another, so they are more likely to work hard to keep the classroom atmosphere positive.
- help the students learn to manage the work they have to do: work with them on keeping their agenda up-to-date. Give them options of what work they should do first. Help them learn to prioritize. A lot of learning has to do with organization.
- pay attention to how you group the students together: make sure to put students together who will help each other learn not detract from the learning process

How to differentiate:
- get to know each student individually
- constantly talk to them to find out what they know to learn what they can do next
- be in touch with their parents to help them work at home and to see what the parents feel like they need to grow in
- keep a notebook with student work, surveys, etc. for each student to follow their progress and to keep in mind what they have to do to be successful learners.

Another article that seemed to fit with these ideas was from an website about differentiation. The website talks about the different steps to teaching in a differentiated manner. One of the major steps is Motivation.

Important ideas for motivating students:
- Challenge them: all students need to be pushed to do as much as they can, and we need to keep pushing them to do more
- Play to their strengths: even students who need differentiated instruction have strengths they can share; they will often improve in other areas when they get to feel like an expert in another
- behavior management

The article gives more ideas to motivate students...


Casson, Kathleen. "Managing a Classroom with Brain Food." LearnNC Web. 8 Nov. 2009. .

Theroux, Priscilla Intrinsic Motivation. Enhance Learning, 1994. Web. 8 Nov. 2009 .

Literacy #8

This weeks reading is a little bit difficult for me to relate to. I have only observed 4th and 5th grade classrooms. It's funny that it worked out that way since I have been observing every semester that I've been at Carolina, but I have really connected with the older students. Reading about emergent literacy is interesting because it is very rare for me to encounter a student who is just beginning to read. I know that the literacy skills of my students before they enter school continue to influence their reading when they get to the upper grades, but I forget the importance of it. A lot of the strategies beginning readers use can still be used by the older students, too. I still see a lot of invented spelling. I do wonder what the best way to move my students from guessing how to spell words to knowing how to spell them correctly. At what point should we stop asking them to make up a spelling? In fourth grade, it doesn't seem unreasonable that a student should know how to spell clothes or which just from seeing them a lot. I have found that spelling is a weakness of most of my students, though. My CT has a spelling list and spelling test each week. She gives them a lot of time in class to work on the words, but there is never a lesson about what these words have in common or why they are important to know. I don't think it fosters understanding of meaning and I don't think it helps them learn the words. I've also noticed that there aren't any words on the walls in her room. If a student asks for help spelling a word, that is the end of the conversation on that word. I just always assumed that it was important to have a word wall. Is it helpful to use a word wall or are there more effective ways of teaching students lots of words?

One cute story this week. A student asked me how to spell "parrot." I asked him what it started with. He said "p." "Good," I responded, "now let me think if I can remember the rest of it. paaarrrrooottt (I sound it out)." "Oh! p-a-r-r-o-t." he decides, "It rhymes with carrot!" I was really excited to see him figure it out for himself and to spell it correctly.

Science--- Sam example

quick Sam example about the food pyramid