Mini-Lesson Blog

Mini-Lesson 1

I have been working in Mrs. Beasley’s kindergarten class since late September 2010. For this mini-lesson I decided to work with a student one-on-one who struggles in many subjects, but I worked with him specifically on sound letter recognition. I have worked with Tristan many times throughout the semester because he is behind the other students in class in all subjects, including reading, writing, and mathematics. Tristan is still having trouble writing his name because he can’t remember what sound goes with what letter. He also struggles with identifying his letters, which may be one of the main reasons why he cannot remember which sounds go with what letters. I decided for this mini lesson I would only focus on the letters that are in his name, since I only had two weeks to work with him. The first week I worked with Tristan for 30 minutes out in the hallway. I started the mini-lesson by asking Tristan if he could use the letter blocks to spell out his name. I only gave Tristan the block letters that he would need to spell out his name. With the letters he spelled out Tisartn. I asked him why he spelled out his name like this and he said because he didn’t really know how to spell his name. For the next 15 minutes we worked on identifying the letters and their sounds. I would hold up the letters in the order that they appeared and asked him to identify the letter and what sound it made. For example, when I held up t he would say that is a t and makes the sound ttt. When I thought he had mastered this skill I set up the letter blocks in order, like this Tristan. I then had him study it and then I scrambled up the letters and had him put the letters back together. As he was moving the letters I had him say what letter it was and then what sound it made. He was able to identify T, i, and r consistently. With some scaffolding he was able to arrange the letters in the correct order. The next week I went back out into the hallway to see if Tristan had retained any information from the week before. For the first activity I asked him to identify the letters and what sound they made. He again, like the week before, was able to identify T, I, and r consistently. I then arranged his name and scrambled up the letters. When I asked him to rearrange the letters he was unable to do so. I think Tristan struggles so much with spelling his name because he cannot recall the letters or their sounds. I have also noticed from working with Tristan a lot of the semester that he has trouble retaining information. This can be seen even throughout this mini-lesson because he did not retain a lot of the information he learned in week 1 into week 2. Overall, I think Tristan needs to work on identifying the letters and retaining information in order for him to be able to identify his letters and what sounds they make.

Mini-Lesson 2

For my second mini-lesson I worked with Larry, who is a low to middle achieving student in my class. Larry sometimes struggles with identifying what letter an object begins with. For example, if I showed him a book he may struggle identifying that book starts with b. I wanted to work with Larry on looking at an object and identifying their beginning sound and what letter that is. For this mini-lesson I used a game that my coordinating teacher had in her classroom that I thought would be affective for teaching letter-sound awareness. This game was set up much like a candy land board game, except it had the letters w, x, y, and z scattered throughout the board. Each player chose a card and had to identify the object and what letter they started with. For example, if I chose a zoo and I identified that zoo started with z then I would move to the closest z spot on the board. Before we started the game I had Larry identify the letters that were on the board. Larry had a hard time identifying x and y, but identified w and z with no problem. We played the game and Larry was able to identify all of the objects on the card without any problem. He struggled, however, to identify what letter the object started with. I helped Larry by emphasizing the first sound of every word. By the end of the game Larry was better identifying what letter the objects started with.

Easter Weekend Post

So,

My final blog post for 402. I could possibly cry.

My favorite quote from either of the three readings came from Tompkins in Chapter 10 when it is said that: "There's no one best way to teach reading and writing." (pg. 324) While it seems pithy to the point of overkill, I really like that! After spending last semester in 401 in which the science TA forced me to not only stymie my own teaching style but only to use materials, choices and stylings that only she would use, I started to get a bit disheartened about the program in general. I thought that the purpose of the TE department was to get us moving in our own direction, to allow us to flourish our own ideas (with some mediation of course) and to find our own strengths and weaknesses as a teacher.

What I like about the quote from Tompkins this week is that it is hopeful in its ambiguity. There really IS no right way to be teaching almost any content area, let alone reading and writing. One way might work perfectly well for me but might be stifling and/or ambiguous at best for someone else (and vice versa). And, since reading and writing is so pervasive in almost every single aspect about school (although I'm not sure how much it has to do with lunch or gym) as a teacher we have to become REALLY comfortable with how we feel we know how to teach it.

I feel like 401 (at least the science portion) was kind of a waste for me. I loved the social studies section of the class. But in science, I feel like I had something taken away from me. I feel like - yes it was important to learn the steps we learned to write the outrageously myopic lesson plan (epic at 43 pages, seriously what was my TA thinking?) - but I can't help but escape the feeling that it was all done at the whim of what my TA wanted to see and not necessarily what would have been beneficial to myself, my CT or our students.

"There's no one best way to teach reading and writing." I couldn't agree more.

Mini Lessons

Every Wednesday at 9:30 I work with a small group of strategic intervention (S.I) leveled 4th graders. They are given a small narrative or informative text to read. Usually they are about 15-20 pages. All the books are educational in some way, usually related to science or social studies. In these small groups, I have each student take turns reading out loud and as we go through the book, I stop and ask comprehensive questions to make sure the students are intaking what they are reading.

Mini Lesson one: Vocabulary.
At the beginning of the book, there is a list of vocabulary words. I have each student explain in their own words what they think the word means. We discuss prefixes, and suffixes to help us to define the word. The biggest challenge for the kids is to not use the vocab word when defining it. I then have them use it in a sentence.
As we begin to read, when we get to one of the vocabulary words, I have the student re read the sentence and we discuss if our definition was correct or in correct. One of the words was present. The students initially defined it as a gift. But as we read on, we found that the word meant that someone was in attendance. When we read the sentence, I asked the students if their definition was right. They replied no. I asked them what they thought the definition was based on context clues and they told me that it meant the character was at the scene. Many of the other vocab words were similar to this one. There was a lot of discussion on how we know that words can look and sound the same but have different meaning and that's why it's important to read the context clues. At the end of the reading, we go back through the definitions and redefine the words. The students write down their definitions in their writing journals.

Lesson 2: Fluency Lesson with one focus student
One of the students I work with the most is probably the lowest reader in 4th grade. I believe he is at a 2nd grade reading level which, believe it or not, is a great improvement from when he started at the beginning of the school year. Together, we worked on his Fluency. The focus of my lesson was for him to stop and put inflictions at the proper times for punctuation such as periods, question marks, exclamation points, commas and dashes. To start the lesson, I had him read two sentences that I made up. The first sentence was a regular sentence without any commas, just a period. The second sentence had a list of items which has commas to separate them and an exclamation point on the end. I had him read both sentences. I then demonstrated how to read it with the proper stops and inflictions and had him read it once more. I then explained to him that as we read our book, he would need to focus on these things. If he started running two distinct sentences together, he would need to re read it. If he had to be stopped many times on that page, I would ask him if he understood what he just read and if he didn't, we'd read it again. The second time always went much more smooth than the first. Since the book was short, after we finish it, I have him read it again; still focusing on reading fluently.

I'm not sure if what I'm doing it benefiting these students all that much since I'm only meeting with them once a week for 30 minutes or so but it seems to help them at the time. Hopefully this is helping them improve their skills.

Readings for April 25

Both Scott readings for this week I have already read however the article “Effective Literacy Instruction for Urban Children” is still extremely relevant to me. The ideas in this article are evident in my placement classroom and the needs of children in the urban learning environment discussed continue to interest me. These needs include emotional support, exposure, and changes in attitude toward education. For the past few weeks I have been sitting at the lunch table in the cafeteria with my students just to hang out with them, get to know them even more, and spend as much possible time with them before the year comes to an end. This article says that certain students in these settings often “enter school with a defeated spirit” and that these students need “support by being compassionate enough to look at each child individually and realistically, to communicate genuine care and concern for the student, and to help the students move past emotional issues being dealt with at home”. I have seen this to be true even by the conversations at the lunch table. I have tried very hard to be someone the students can come to if they have a problem and to show them I care about them. This is so important. You cannot hope to get content through to students if they do not think you care about them whatsoever. Some of these kids are dealing with things at home that make content learning seem unimportant. The article discussed how it is easy to assume these students are lazy and do not want to do their work, when in reality there could be so much more behind their behavior in school and things going on in their home life you do not know about. It is so important to remember this and to actually listen to your students. I cannot begin to tell you how much I have learned this semester from my placement. It was such an eye opening experience and I am so grateful for this experience, even though it was very tough at times.

Week of April 18: Reading Mini Lessons and Reflections

For one of my mini lessons in my placement classroom I worked with a group of 4 students during their reading time. I read a book with them about bridges. It was a short informational chapter book with several real photos and facts about specific bridges. I used the comprehension strategy of KWL with this small group of students. This specific group of students was the higher-level reading group. These students were in my Watson’s Go to Birmingham group also so I was very familiar with their abilities and therefore used a lot of the adaptations from my literacy lesson plan. We completed a group KWL chart instead of individually because the students had never been exposed to this chart before. Before we read, the students struggled a little to think of fact for the K column, things they already knew on the topic (bridges). They had a few comments about bridges that they wanted to put in this column such as “there are many different kinds, there is a bridge called the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan, and there are bridges all around us”. They briefly flipped through the book a little and looked at the pictures. Some things they said they wanted to know included a lot about the construction of bridges such as, “how do they make bridges over water, how long does it take to build a big bridge, what different kinds are there, and what is the biggest/longest bridge in the world”. After reading the book we then filled in the L column, what they learned. They all had a lot to add to this column and were excited to share the facts they had learned and each student contributed at least 2 facts in this column. They even included the vocabulary words from the book such as “truss, aqueduct, suspension bridge, arch bridge, and beam bridge”. I think this technique was very beneficial for these students and it helped to organize their thoughts on the topic and made the reading more meaningful. Because bridges are not a topic the students thought they needed to necessarily know, by completing this chart it allowed students to see that you can practice reading and comprehension with any book. I would definitely use this technique with these students again. Reading this book was supposed to help them with fluency and decoding, however by using KWL it encompassed another reading strategy that students can use in years to come.

For my second mini lesson I worked with one student on scaffolding vocabulary learning. I decided to do this after my Watson’s Go to Birmingham book club because I had read about it in the Scott article (called Scaffolding Vocabulary Learning). Right after I had read this article I had wished I used some of these techniques with my group. I decided to chose one of my students from the group and revisit some vocabulary and use the solution the article suggests of “building links”. I really loved the idea of using a concept map to make these links and I know that concept maps are very helpful for me personally to organize ideas and make connections. I decided to use the vocabulary word “racism” (just like the example in the article) because we had discussed similar terms briefly before reading the book and never revisited them. The student struggled a little to get started and said he had never done a concept map before. As we talked through it he ended up really enjoying it. The first thing he wrote was “church bombing” because it was what we had discussed recently in regards to this topic from our book club book. He then went on to add, “Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, boycotts, hate, blacks and whites, marches, because of color you don’t like someone, protests, civil rights movement, segregation, separate schools for blacks and whites, and 1963”. I helped him and scaffolding him to get him to remember some of these from our previous discussion before we read the book, however I was shocked with how well he did. He included a lot of ideas from the book, but also included other things he has learned this year that are related. He said he really liked this activity and I think it really helped him to see these connections directly made, and to see how it all fit together. Because I personally see great benefits from concept maps I think I will definitely use this technique in the future whether it is as a whole class, small groups, or individually. I think by building these links students are able to grasp the meaning of vocabulary words much more than they would if you simply read, wrote, and memorized the definition.

April 11

The reading I chose to focus on this week was the Scott reading called Scaffolding Vocabulary Learning: Ideas for Equity in Urban Settings. I was drawn to this article because of the fact that it deals with urban settings. Because of my placement classroom and because I have heard a lot of stories from other educators in urban settings, I found this material to be relevant and interesting. Scott points out that in urban reform efforts the achievement gap in reading has received much attention and less attention has been given to the gap in knowledge of word meanings. Because word meaning is so closely related to reading and reading comprehension relies on vocabulary knowledge I think this is very important to address. I found it interesting that low-income 4th grade students were one year behind grade level norms and by 7th grade they were two years behind. Because my placement is in a 4th grade low-income classroom this really stood out to me. I think it is safe to say this is evident in my classroom and in my school, Wainwright Elementary, overall. There was one sentence in particular in this article that was really astounding to me and I still cannot stop thinking about. In a study mentioned in this article it was found that “on average 3 year old children of professional parents had a recorded vocabulary size greater than the parents of children on welfare” (Scott). This is such a shocking fact and it truly shows how large the gap is. The article points out that in order to change this; first and foremost, in these schools the type of informal vocabulary coaching in advantaged households must not only be mirrored but also intensified. In my placement class I have barely seen any vocabulary practice or instruction. The amount that I have seen is limited to writing words down and copying the definitions from the glossary of their textbooks. This is hardly sufficient and it is clear there needs to be much more vocabulary instruction in this classroom. The article then goes on to suggest many solutions such as building links, blending content learning and word learning, scaffolding writing with a focus on word choice, and using word play. One solution that stood out to me was the concept map with a specific word. This allows students to build links and connect this word to other things they know. The article used the word ‘racism’ as an example and in my literacy lesson I also addressed similar words such as ‘segregation’, ‘racism’, and ‘discrimination’. The students we able as a whole (group of 5 students) to make these connects and mentioned Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, boycotts, etc. I think it would have been beneficial to draw a concept map either individually or as a group so that students could visually see these connections and realize they all were related. Overall this article was insightful and I found the solutions and arguments to be interesting and relevant.

Scaffolding Vocabulary Learning

For this week’s readings I want to talk about the reading by Scott that is titled Scaffolding Vocabulary Learning. I think this article is important for teachers to read and understand because in order to comprehend a text the reader needs to know and understand vocabulary that will be seen throughout the reading. The Scott reading looks at best practices for teaching vocabulary and how vocabulary develops in children. The part of the reading that I thought was most interesting was how students learn vocabulary. The reading states that vocabulary learning is multidimensional, which means that in order for a student to really understand a word they should be able to define the word and all of its meanings and now how they could vary in speech. The reading also says that word learning is incremental and takes place in many steps over time. This means that it may take a student many exposures, with the word to know the definition and be able to use it and comprehend it. The next step in vocabulary use is that different types of words require different types of instruction. I know this from experience because vocabulary for language arts is easier for my third grade class to learn than vocabulary for science. The last suggestion for vocabulary teaching is that traditional dictionaries are not good tools for learning the meaning of words. This is because the dictionaries give the implicit meaning and does not include different ways that the word could be use. This reminds me of when I was in school and my fourth grade discouraged us from looking up the meaning of words in the dictionary and I imagine that it was for this reason. I will think about these teaching hints when I am teaching vocabulary because they are very valid points.