Literacy Blog Week 3: Book Club Plus

Because I am placed in a fifth grade classroom, much of the work we’ve been doing is MEAP focused; and it will continue to be this way until mid October. Unfortunately, until MEAP is over, we are going to be focusing on less meaningful, more standardized test-based literacy instruction.

Despite our current focus on MEAP reading strategies, we have introduced our class to the beginning of a literacy program. Unlike math, there is no specific curriculum resource for ELA in our school. We do however collaborate with the other two fifth grade teachers to develop our own literacy curriculum based on a number of different resources (namely book clubs/literacy circles and writer’s workshop). After reading the first five chapters of Book Club Plus, it became obvious to me that many of the tactics mention in this text we also present in our own classroom materials.

Among other items, it is my opinion that explicit teaching of comprehension strategies is among the most important aspects of developing “good readers;” I was pleased to see a focus on this literacy component both in my placement as well as in the text. Although we haven’t gotten into too many details in my placement just yet, I am hoping to see my CT teach several comprehension strategies (QAR, SQP2RS, KWL, etc.). I have already observed my CT perform several “think alouds” (as described in Classroom Management) in other subject areas and I hope to be able to observe her using this same method of modeling when teaching literacy topics – specifically with comprehension and word consciousness.

Aspects of literacy teaching I have witnessed (though not necessarily within a structured literacy program) include developing vocabulary, text processing strategies, and writing into, through and out of units. Surprisingly, most of these observations came during mathematics instruction! For the past week or so we have been studying factors/multiples, rectangular arrays, long division, divisibility rules and now squaring/exponents. Before introducing each topic formally, my CT presents the students with a number/problem and asks them to consider what they know about how to solve it. When they present their problem-solving strategy (orally), my CT requires the students to provide written evidence explaining their process. Throughout the lesson, my CT models “think alouds” noting key vocabulary. Sometimes she defines the terms for the children and other times she “wonders where she could find the meaning for this term” – which prompts the children to flip to the glossary, table of contents, subheadings within the unit section in a race to come up with the answer first. At the end of each lesson problem set the children “self-evaluate” their understanding by giving a check plus (I understand this fully), check (I still need some help with this), or check minus (I still need a lot of help with this). In addition to the self-evaluation, each child fills out an “exit survey” at the conclusion of each quiz or test. In this exit survey students are asks to write a total of five statements reflecting on the unit, what they learned and what they hope to learn more about. So, in a lot of ways, literacy is practiced pretty heavily in our math program – especially in terms of writing in, through and out of units.

In terms of text processing strategies, students are working on effective note-taking strategies to “get the main points” of articles, textbook units and fiction texts. They then in turn practice writing five sentence summaries on their reading logs (5 paragraphs of summary per week). In addition to reading, we also introduced the PAW program which stands for “paragraph a week”. In this exercise, students are working on using the six characteristics of good writing “conventions, voice, organization, ideas, sentence fluency, and word choice” as they respond to a given prompt. This week, the students are asked to recall a “snapshot” of a “fall memory” and retell it using figurative language (we are focusing heavily on creativity in word choice). Today, the students worked hard to “craft” their “topic sentences” for their PAW; they worked hard to find a balance between telling the reader about their topic in the first sentence and finding an engaging opening.

In sum, I have already observed a lot of literacy teaching – just not necessarily within a structured literacy program just yet. I am however confident that my CT will employ many of the techniques mentioned in the Book Club Plus program when a literacy program is further developed post-MEAP.