Lesson Reflection

Students seemed to understand most of the lesson(s) – both in terms of content and process goals. In the introductory historical fiction lesson, students were able to apply the criteria their historical fiction webs (graphic organizers) to our read aloud book George Washington’s Socks by Elvira Woodruff. Students identified characteristics of the historical fiction genre and recorded examples of these characteristics from the text into a web of their own. In the second lesson, students were asked to use a t-chart to organize examples of “detailed characterization” from our read aloud book – and consequently make inferences about the characters’ personalities based on “details the author provided”. Students then used a blank t-chart to list historical events or time periods they were interested in writing about (as the setting of their own historical fiction writing piece), including details from the period or event in the right column – students used in class resources and background knowledge to complete these charts. Students were ALL very successful in completing this exercise. The third lesson was based on sequencing and transition words (something my CT and I have been noticing as a common weakness among many of our students). In their writing, many of our students “string” their ideas together into a paragraph-length run-on-sentence – connecting ideas with “and thens” and “so”. During this lesson, students helped me to correct a giant run-on-sentence “paragraph” similar to those I was receiving as writing samples. Students were enthusiastic about making the changes, and accurately addressed each “problem” with the passage. Students successfully eliminated “and then”s and “so”s by replacing them with more creative transitional phrases and punctuation. I am interested to see how these minilessons are reflected in their drafting in the upcoming lessons.

My CT and I both considered the trio of lessons to be received well by the students, and the vast majority of the students performed as expected during assessment discussion and activities. The students generally seem to be receptive and enthusiastic about the idea of improving their writing.

After parent-teacher and student-teacher writing conferences, my CT and I learned that many of our students feel that writing is their weakest academic skill. The lack of confidence and willingness to take risks and experiment with language was very surprising to me! Because of this, I am working hard to develop key aspects of the “writing craft” - one skill at a time. Explicit modeling of these skills, followed by guided learning practice and student-teacher (one-on-one) conferences have been essential for this group of writers. Despite the large number of above grade-level readers we have in this classroom, we have just as many low-level writers. My goal for the remainder of the year is to design lesson plans that will slowly improve students’ writing confidence, and eventually match student writing with the high-level reading we are seeing thus far.

In teaching these minilessons, I am making a conscious effort to consistently review the “crafts” we’ve learned and apply them to the skills/concepts of the current lesson. In this way, the minilessons build on one another, consistently repeating the same skills. Much of the re-teaching I will do for struggling students will be limited to conversation and examples given during one-on-one conferencing. This group of students seems to benefit immensely from one-on-one work.

I honestly wouldn’t change much of the lessons I’ve taught – students were clear on the goals of the lessons, students participated enthusiastically and applied new knowledge accurately during the lesson, and self-evaluated their learning at the lesson close. Most students continued on to apply the “craft” concepts/processes in their own historical fiction pieces. If I could re-write these lessons, I may have begun this unit with a lesson on research – more specifically, how to look up details from other time periods to aid in historical fiction writing.

Reflection of lessons

My planned lessons were in the first week of my unit, which was a reading writing connection focusing on historical fiction.  My lessons focused on identifying the elements of historical fiction books, and then using this to write their own historical fiction.  The three lessons I focused on all involved brainstorming and researching for their own writing.

            I feel that my students learned how to effectively use brainstorming strategies, specifically using t-charts.  My CT often uses t-charts (one side ideas the other expand on the ideas) to organize thoughts, so I direct modeled their use and then my students used the same strategy to develop their thoughts and ideas.  I observed a lot of my students effectively use this brainstorming strategy, whereas previously many of my students were skipping the brainstorming step altogether. 

            My bilingual students have started to get parapro support this past week, where they get taken out of our classroom for an hour each day.  Quite unfortunately, this time is during our literacy block.  Therefore, these students are the ones who are struggling the most with this unit. I have been scaffolding the brainstorming with all of my other students, starting with setting, then going to characters, then sequencing their actual narrative out.  My bilingual students instead didn’t get the whole process, and looking at their writing, many of them are writing biographys or non-fiction narratives about historical events.   Other than that, my students were struggling with coming up with historical details and then transferring that information to an actual narrative.

            I learned my students have research skills that I was unaware of.  My CT and I were planning on doing a research unit involving a persuasive paper, focusing heavily on introducing the process of researching.  However, given resources my students have show adequate ability to pull out relevant information, as well as take organized notes.  This will aid us in shaping our future research projects.

            This is a month long unit of historical fiction, so the students who need additional support understanding the genre itself will have much more opportunity to interact with the genre throughout the month.  I am also going to sit down with the bilingual para pro to give more specific expectations and objectives, so that all of my students are on the same page in the future.

            I have learned a lot reflecting upon this unit.  If I were to do these lessons again, I would wait to introduce the writing portion until after we had already thoroughly introduced the genre of historical fiction.  Having both launched at the same time I think was overwhelming and my students may have been able to better start historical fiction narratives with more experience with the genre itself first. Also, I would create a written description of the writing assignment, so my students would have a more concrete idea of their expectations.  This lack of planning on my part resulted in confusion in my students.  I might also put it later in the year, when my students have had more time to learn history (which is a part of the fifth grade curriculum), so they would have more background knowledge on historical events to use for their writings.

Week 6

There is a strong link between reading fluency and reading comprehension.  Fluency or word recognition is the ability to recognize and read words, while comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning behind words. In the beginning grades, reading fluency is a strong focus so students are able to recognize the symbols that represent sounds and make words; while in upper grades comprehension is more of a focus for using reading to learn.  Without the ability to recognize or decode the words, students will not be able to comprehend their meaning.  Comprehension is employed once a word has been recognized or decoded.  Both aspects of reading are incredibly important for students to be successful readers.

            In my classroom, as I know we have all said many times, I have only seen MEAP prep and haven’t really seen much involved in literacy yet.  We have done DRA testing however, and this was the only assessment I have seen regarding fluency.  The students were timed reading different passages and their accuracy was assessed.  This was really the only way we have so far assessed fluency.  We have also done one exercise in teaching some greek and latin root word then breaking apart words into their roots and affixes to determine meaning; encouraging more decoding strategies.  Other than this, I haven’t seen any ways we teach fluency in our classroom.

            To really understand my students reading development, we need to assess more their ability to decode and their fluency.  A lot of our students have low levels of comprehension and therefore low reading levels.  It is important to know if my students are not comprehending due to the level of the text or because of problems with decoding.  If a students fluency is what is interfering with comprehension, it is important to know that to be able to accommodate to that student.  It is easy for teachers to see students with low comprehension and give them lower level texts or encourage more comprehension strategies, when in fact it may be the students decoding strategies.  It is very important to realize where the interference is coming in and then help those students.  I really am not sure how we would be able figure these out other than using our DRA’s, since I haven’t really been exposed or observed more methods of assessing.

Fluency vs. Comprehension

Reading fluency and comprehension are inherently linked. Without reading fluency, students are unable to make meaning of what they’re reading. In my class, I haven’t seen much reading instruction as of yet: most of our reading instruction has been direction-oriented. In other words, helping students decide how to pick out what questions are asking and whether or not they answered what was requested of them. We finally got through DRA testing each of our students this week and the results were very interesting. We have students at every level imaginable (low: 28 and high: 80), but reading fluency and comprehension seemed to be closely related in the students’ scores. However, some children that had very good comprehension scores (in their writing response/reflection scores) had very low WPM scores. They seemed to read slow and steady, but had some of the best comprehension scores in the class!

This year, I’m not sure how my CT will go about teaching reading strategies. As I mentioned previously, I have observed several lessons in my placement that teach comprehension strategies, however I am uncertain as to how other reading strategies will be addresses. Hopefully a reading curriculum will come to fruition after MEAP testing concludes and I will be able to report back in greater detail!

Week 6

Reading fluency is the ability to read text accurately and fluently, while reading comprehension is described more as understanding of text or writing. The relationship between them is that in order for reading comprehension to be achieved I think that it is dependent on fluency in being able to read the text and understanding the text in an accurate way. Being able to understand and comprehend reading, a student needs to be able to recognize the words and their meanings in the text.

To assess and teach fluency in my classroom—my CT uses the making meaning curriculum and their assessments. For example, the unit I will be starting is a unit surrounding expository texts and the assessment at the end of the unit is an article considered to be an expository text and then a series of questions. Another way that my teacher assesses reading comprehension and fluency is by using Time for Kids in social studies instruction time. The students receive Time for Kids and they take a multiple-choice ten-question quiz on the various articles from the magazine.

I think that the reading comprehension and fluency of my students’ also need to be understood by listening to them read specific leveled passages aloud and then prompt them with questions on the spot, that could be answered aloud through discussion- to assess comprehension ability.

Online Module Week 5 task 4

Diedra Gammill

Learning the write way

This article discusses the idea of writing to learn, contrasted to the common idea of writing to communicate, convince, or entertain.  It encourages the idea that writing is not just an exclusive domain of the language arts curriculum, but that it can and should be integrated throughout all subjects to encourage higher level thinking and reflection.  Using tools such as K-W-L (know-want to know-learn) charts or journals, science journals or math logs, will allow student to write in an informal way while still allowing for teachers to assess learning.  Using writing in this way in all subjects allows for student to make inferences, draw upon previous knowledge as well as synthesize materials.  While having classroom discussions is a great instructional tool, it does not allow for students to engage is higher level thinking in the same way that writing would.  Writing to learn really encourages students to explore material and then relate it to themselves and what it means to them. This type of informal writing without having to worry about conventions gives students a “safe” writing zone where they can really develop the ability to share their thinking through writing.

I really liked this approach to writing as a supplemental activity in all core content areas.  Too often I feel teachers see writing as something that has to be done on its own, encouraging different genres and styles.  While this knowledge is important, it is also important to encourage students to be critical thinkers, which this type of writing really does.  I could definitely see this being used in my fifth grade classroom.  We already have science journals, where they could write reflection entries at the end of a lesson or write about what they still need to know.  I really liked the idea of math logs, since math and writing are normally two subjects that are considered disjoint.  I think this would be a great challenge for my students, to articulate their mathematical and logical reasoning strategies into words.  It would really allow for them to analyze their own thinking, something we are trying to encourage.

Do use this approach, I would need to learn how to phrase prompts to students for their writing.  How could I get them to write about what they learned in math or how or why they solved a problem using logical reasoning as opposed to just writing the exact process.  It would be challenging to get the students to analyze their thinking in a way that they could write it out.  I would also need to find a way to encourage students to be comfortable using writing in all areas and not just seeing writing as a part of language arts.

This module really helped me see how I can assess my students for my lesson.  The videos I viewed on a fifth grade writers workshop really displayed how I can scaffold certain ideas and then relate them to student’s own writing.  I was also able to see how he assessed students all throughout the process using anecdotal notes.  In my own unit, my students are going to be writing a historical fiction piece.  Through this reading, I can see how I can relate social studies journals to the writing we are going to be doing and how I can integrate writing into the content areas.  I need to find out how much knowledge my students have on the genre itself, how well they are already able to communicate ideas, as well as how well they can use descriptions and era appropriate material to make a reader understand the time period.

Gill 2007: The Forgotten Genre of Children’s Poetry

This piece was about the importance of bringing quality children’s literature into the classroom. The main focus of this piece was the misguided understanding of what children’s poetry is. Many of the poetry anthologies put together for children are really collections of what adults consider to be the “great poems” and are intended for the adult canon. According to Gill, pieces like these “teach children that poems are written by “great poets” which can only be understood and evaluated by academics, whose job it is to tell the rest of us a poem’s meaning” (Gill, 622). In reality, poetry for children is not meant to hold some secret meaning, but instead to show children that “people write poems to share their experiences” (Gill, 623). To help children enjoy poetry, we have to show children “what poetry is:” “a concise and memorable case of language, with intense feeling, imagery, and qualities of sound that bounce pleasingly off the tongue, tickle the ear, and leave the mind something to ponder” (Gill, 623). As Janine Certo advises, poems children read should have “clarity of thought, evidence of technique, and sincerity of tone” and that they should “sensitize young students in their reactions and responses to literature.”

I actually took a course at MSU co-taught by Janine Certo and Laura Apol, which focused on integrating poetry into the literacy curriculum for elementary age children. Because of this, I am excited to work on the fifth grade poetry unit during my internship year! What is somewhat unfortunate however, is that poetry is only addressed in its isolated “poetry unit” as it is in so many only schools and curricula. It is my hope that I may be able to integrate examples of poetry in mini lessons for writing – similar to the topic of “beautiful writing” in Mark White’s fifth grade classroom. It is my opinion that appropriately selected poetry anthologies may be beneficial mentor texts for children on this topic because poetry is all about selecting the “most meaningful” and “descriptive” words (hence, word choice). This article is full of title suggestions for poetry that is written for children, that could in fact be used as mentor texts.

As I mentioned previously, I have already had a semester’s worth of training in integrating poetry into the curriculum and I have created several lesson plans for this purpose in the process. I have not however, been able to determine which poems are appropriate for fifth graders in particular. I am still in contact with my instructors from MSU (Laura Apol in particular) who is always happy to help and offer advice and I plan to utilize her as a resource!

In terms of assessments and this module and how they relate to my unit, I think I need to change how I observe my students. I really need to focus on how I can help my students along this “continuous path” of writing progress and what my students “do well in writing” specifically. Because of MEAP preparation, I really have not had too many opportunities to conference with students. Actually, because my CT does not typically conference with students, it is going to be difficult for me to use her assessment strategies as examples for my own. During my unit, I hope to focus heavily of conferencing with my students as my main point of assessment and I plan to use Mark White as an example of how to assess students effectively so that they too can benefit from the process. Because my unit is not yet set in stone (due to MEAP chaos) I am not yet sure of how much writing my students will be doing during my unit – as much as I would like to implement a writers workshop.