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.

Kovalcik & Certo 2007

The big idea behind this article, surrounds incorporating mini-lessons of Poetry into the classroom. The way that these poetry mini lessons were incorporated was modeled after specific types of poem. The desired result from these lessons would be to have a "cafe" like setting where the students had the opportunity to present their poetry they had been working on to parents, teachers, administrators, etc. The result would come from various mini-lessons on specific types of poetry. Various types included, onomatopoeia, color /rhyme, repetition/alliteration, and collaborative poetry. Once the lessons were completed, letters would be sent home to parents/ families about the cafe they would have in the classroom. Students used peer conferencing to prepare themselves for the cafe, and they rehearsed reading their poetry pieces aloud for one another. When they did this, students were encouraged to say two positive comments, and one suggestion for improvement.

I think I could use this approach at my grade level, however I think that the poetry lessons would need to be more advanced- or more detailed, because my students are in the sixth grade. I think that poetry is a valuable thing to incorporate into writing/ reading instruction because it can be so powerful and give the students a chance to feel connected to something so powerful. For my students, I do not know if I would have the cafe setting because it seems like my students would benefit more from something like an "open mic night" or just a day in our classroom where we perform for each other- in a less exaggerated way. Rather, it is just an opportunity to share our poetry if we felt like it. Students would have a few mini-lessons on specific types of poetry and they could write and turn in those poems-- but then also students could have the opportunity to do research on different types of poetry and they could complete a poem of whatever type they choose- and they could have the chance to share one of these and/or other poems in an "open mic" sort of format, so it feels more informal- yet still exciting.

For this approach to work well with my students, I would need to find out and study what types of poetry, if any my students have already studied and what sorts of lessons or formats of studying poetry have they experienced. I would also benefit from talking and visiting with other teachers who teach upper elementary grades to find out how they have incorporated poetry lesson in their literacy instruction.

My unit focuses on expository texts- and I think that I would need to assess how they read different types of text, as well as how they write different types or genres of writing. In the sixth grade they go through a number of differing types of writing. They are beginning with their personal narrative- and through writer's workshop and analysis of student work in this module- I realize there are so many different ways to assess my students in both reading/ writing. As writers, for my unit I think having them write an essay with a prompt question based on one of the expository texts we study, or a prompt from a text given with the prompt would be a valid way to assess them as both readers of expository texts and writers- when thinking about them using a writing process to write about text they had just read.

WEEK 4- Readings Blog Post

From what I have seen thus far in my classroom it is really difficult to determine how similar the assessment structure will be in my classroom in comparisons with Book Club Plus. Even though we have done some preparation for MEAP- it has not taken up all of the time, however I still have not seen any reading assessments done aside from DIEBELS-, Which I facilitated, on a one to one basis with every student on our team. The reading assessment consists of having the students read aloud for one minute, and I time and record how many errors they make in that minute. The Book Club plus talks about the use of self- evaluation. This is the only form that I have seen so far in my classroom aside from the DIEBELS reading assessment that I touched on briefly previously. Every day my students have 30 minutes of individual reading time. “IRG time” IRG stands for Independent Reading Goals, and each trimester the student gets a recording sheet to record to number of ‘Accelerated Reader’ books they complete. Every time they complete an ‘AR’ book they are supposed to take the ‘AR’ test from the Novi Meadows media center, or the link from the website. Also part of this independent reading for each trimester is a reading journal and a goal. The goal is the number of books the student wants to finish by the end of the trimester, and the journal includes 2 to 4 sentences written every day after the student reads their book during silent reading.

I find it really interesting in my class to see that the books in the library are not labeled or in any specific order to show what level they are. And there has not been any evidence of reading based on the different levels of readers we have in the classroom which I find interesting. In past classrooms, I always experienced a teacher having to meet with literature circles because there were various levels. The students do work on writing, and I tested them in reading- however nothing really has been done with the data since which makes it really difficult to relate to the different literacy benchmarks and standards that the chapters in Book Club Plus discuss. I am curious to see when and how this data will be incorporated into the classroom and curriculum framework, however I am also nervous because it seems that since our school has relatively good test scores and MEAP scores that these differing levels of students writing and reading may become abandoned- so I am curious to see what will happen once MEAP is over with.

Book Club Plus Week 4

Like my co-members of this blog, I am also in an upper elementary classroom, and because of this all of our literacy instruction has been MEAP based and does not mirror our actual classroom instruction on literacy.  I however have been able to talk to my CT about what our classroom is going to be like after the tests, so I used those conversations in my hypothetical comparison for this blog.

            In the assessment chapter, I really found a lot of thing that I think are similar to our literacy model.  Our students will be placed in leveled reading groups, similar to the book club plus model.  In these groups, each student has a role they are responsible for while all reading a common book.  These groups are discussion based, with the students responsible for their own progress and learning.  The Book Club plus framework discusses self-evaluation, and at the end of each of our student’s books, they have a self and group evaluation form that they fill out.   In terms of assessments that I have seen so far in my classroom, we have done DRA’s and collected a few writing samples.  Other than this, there hasn’t really been any assessment done (once again, blame the MEAP).  The writing samples we do have are paragraphs based upon a prompt, but were not assessed in a formal way.  We are still definitely in the process of determining levels and abilities, and don’t really have very much for formal assessments.

The book also identified the importance of matching up to benchmarks and standards.  While I have been unable to really see this in literacy in my classroom, I know that in all of our other subjects so far, we write the objective on the board and state it for our students.  This not only gives the students a common goal and purpose, but also allows for us as teachers to really shape our daily instruction.  I really liked the idea of shaping these objectives in the frame of “I can statement”, because I feel it really would give students ownership of their own learning, as well as a form of assessment for teachers.

When reading about the classroom management strategies, it was really almost impossible for me to make connections, as these are all specific to the framework that I haven’t been able to observe yet.  In terms of selecting quality literature, my CT has a selection of books that are sorted by level and genre that she has students select their books from.  After looking through these books, I have seen that  these books contain themes and topics that really allow for discussion and have content relatable to the 5^th grade standards.  These books are also incredibly diverse and are culturally relevant to our schools diverse population.   I’m not sure exactly how my CT normally groups our students, however I really liked the idea of grouping quiet students together or a group of talkative students.  I also thought it would be better to pair some quiet and some talkers, however upon thinking about it further I really see the potential advantages.  Students who are generally normally quiet would have to speak if they were in a group together, rather than a talkative student taking over.  Vice versa, important compromise skills could be learned by a group of talkative students.  After reading about all of these ideas, I’m really interested to see how my CT conducts our literacy.

Book Club Plus Week 4

After reading book club plus, I found it difficult to determine what aspects of the “assessments” and “classroom management [for book club]” are actually used in my placement. As I mentioned previously, much of our academic day is consumed by MEAP preparation; and because of this, it is difficult to picture what a “normal” literacy block will look like until MEAP testing concludes. That said, instead of observing these Book Club Plus elements in action, I simply asked my CT some questions and looked more deeply into our classroom reading and writing curricula in an attempt to find connections.

In terms of assessment and clarity of the literacy standards and benchmarks, my CT has mentioned that she would like to make an effort to make “working towards the big ideas in literacy” a norm in our classroom environment. In my own experience with making the standards and benchmarks a common and well-known goal, it has helped to write the goals in a visibly accessible place (for each lesson) and to say them aloud. This focus on clarity in working towards goals was actually a feature of my TESOL program. In fact, each lesson plan we wrote had to include a language goal along with the content goal and was required to be written in an accessible place (on the board) for students to refer to as well as explained orally. Just as we design our lessons along the lines of meeting clear standards, students should be able to refer to these same benchmarks to mark their progress towards meeting these goals. This in turn helps students to self-evaluate their learning progress within the same set of standards that teachers work within. In other words, we all need to be on the same page – learning goals should not be a secret! I mentioned the “I can…” statements (derived from the standards/benchmarks) to my CT in our discussion, and we are going to try and begin incorporating these statements in our everyday lessons (both in writing and verbally). To her credit, I feel that my CT is very skilled in terms of making her expectations clear (four phases of assessment) - she is very good at explaining the importance (verbally) of being a successful reader/writer and what a successful reader/writer “looks like and sounds like”.

With regard to assessments, the only rubrics/official assessments I’ve observed have been DRAs and a few brief writing samples. Because my CT has mentioned her preference for more “scripted” reading and writing programs, I am interested to see whether or not she ventures to create her own rubrics or writing/reading assessments outside of those prescribed in Making Meaning and Writers Express. The writing samples we’ve collected thus far were mostly short paragraphs based on a writing prompt (i.e. talk about a fall memory using descriptive language). These writing samples have been evaluated very casually using the “six traits of writing” as general rules (not in a rubric form).

At this point, it is really difficult to make any observations on classroom management as it relates to Book Club Plus. We are still in the phase where we are trying to determine which students are at what level. Based on the DRA scores from last year, it appears that we have a group of very low students [for literacy] – one student with a DRA of 28 in fifth grade! We are considering using the Soaring to Success program for book club with these students which focuses on scaffolding reading comprehension, as well as making inferences and summarizing (this program is focused heavily on students “thinking about their own thinking”). In terms of the reading then, differentiated instruction as described in Book Club Plus is well supported by the diversity of reading and writing programs used within our classroom. I hope to be able to draw more connections from my placement as MEAP testing concludes.