It provides great ideas to get students interested and involved in the reading process. She gives an example of reading books as a group that may be above their reading level. They then do a variety of charts and brainstorm as a group what went on in the book. She also recommends using two different books and having the students compare and contrast the books. It is similar to what we have been learning in our literacy class, this just provides some more resources for teachers to use in their classroom! Hope you enjoy and get a change to view the presentation, it is really good!
Literacy and Technology in the Classroom
My passion = teaching and inspiring kids to dream big :: "Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." -Harriet Tubman
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Ideas for Reading Intervention
In the blog Hello Literacy posted on November 12, 2012, Jones talks about a common core lesson to help with reading intervention and literacy. Here is the link to the presentation she posted, it is full of great resources and I would recommend taking a look at it.
Focus Poetry in the classroom
She also posted some cute bulletin board pieces to go along with the lesson.
Focus poetry integrates writing and language arts as well as a different form of writing. Another way to extend this lesson would be to have the students create their own poems and have their classmates analyze them. I hope you enjoy and check out the post for more resources about focus poetry!
Monday, November 5, 2012
Making Connections: text to self, text to text, text to world
In my 3rd grade class we have been
learning about making connections about text to self, text to text, and text to
world. The post I chose to write about
discusses different ways to have students think about connections in their
life. The post was entitled “Making
Connections” on the Hello Literacy blog, written on October 7. The first thing it shows is a picture rubric
that can be used to assess whether the student made a meaningful/ thoughtful
connection or needs improvement. It is a
great visual for students to use in order to see if they are on track. After teaching a connections lesson to a
small guided reading group I found that this rubric would have been helpful to
show the students in order to give them a visual aid/ reference to go back to
when writing their connections. The post also gave a link to other rubrics
that teachers can use from the website Teachers pay Teachers. The website has a number of free and easy
downloadable rubrics for schools to use.
Below is the rubric I found on the blog.
The blog continues to talk about the importance of
connections and how it can help students see different perspectives and make
text meaningful to their lives. For
example, in my guided reading group we were reading a book entitled “Regina’s
Ride.” It was all about a girl and her
family going on a bike ride, but the brother wanted to play video games. Once we finished reading the book we talked
about possible connections. One of the
boys in my group started talking about how he loves playing video games and
does not like riding his bike. It was
clear he was able to make a text to self connection from the reading. When he was able to see a similarity he became
more interested in what he was reading.
The blog provided a lot of great resources that
teacher’s can use. It also linked to
other blogs that provided various ideas to go along with making
connections. It was really helpful
reading why making connections is so important and how to make it more meaningful
for your students. I would recommend reading the post and visiting the other
blogs mentioned in the post!
Friday, October 12, 2012
Technology, this is our life!
Imagine a world without a hard copy of textbooks, paper
tests, or hand written stories….
This world is coming soon to our classrooms! American schools are integrating more and more technology into classrooms. Some of the technology seen within schools today are ipads, smart boards, and computers. With the fast pace of
technology being integrated into the daily lives of students, our future kids
will be experts on using technology in the near future if they are not already…
This being said, we as teachers need to become familiar
with the different technology available to us.
Although I am not tech savvy, I am aware that as a teacher I will need
to become more comfortable with technology such as smart boards and online
tests in order to relate to the ever changing society that my students are growing
up in. This week I chose to follow a technology blog written by Will
Richardson. The post was written on
October 8 and is entitled “New Workshop on Abundant Learning.” Will offers different workshops that teach
people about implementing technology into teaching and their daily lives. Some of the statistics about technology
listed on his blog were, there are “Two trillion
WebPages, two billion people connected online, over 600,000 apps and 1.2
billion smart phones.” After seeing
these statistics it became more clear to me how much technology impacts our
daily lives. We are a technology driven
society so, in my opinion, the need for understanding how to implement this in
a classroom is important.
In today’s world we have access to a
number of resources online. Growing up in the 1990's,
technology was just beginning. Over the
last 2 decades it has evolved SO much! Will talks about how resources used to
be limited, but now we have an “abundance” of resources available, but some
people are unsure what to do with them. As teachers we need to be prepared to integrate it into our classrooms in order to prepare our students for the future. In the real world they will need to know how to use technology by the time they start their career. This will help them to get ahead and be prepared when they reach college of begin their career. The
workshops sound like a great way to learn and improve skills so that a teacher
can keep up with the ever changing society and give their kids a head start in furthering their education.
Will created these workshops because he is aware of the growing need for
teachers to be able to understand and implement these resources that are at their
finger tips. I would personally enjoy
going to one of the workshops to learn and familiarize myself with different
programs and resources to engage my students in the learning process and make sure they understand how to use technology as well.
Question: Did your teacher integrate technology in your
classroom when you were a kid? If so, what did he/she use? If not, do you wish
they had?
Friday, September 28, 2012
Common Core Running Records
Hey there! Welcome to my blog! I am so excited about
the blog I am following called Hello Literacy by Jennifer Jones. Jones is a K-12 Reading Specialist who lives
in North Carolina. So far I have enjoyed reading her blog. It is full of a lot of examples of reading
strategies that I have seen implemented in my third grade classroom this fall. There is so much within the blog that I am
excited to explore throughout the semester!
The
first post I wanted to share was written on September 24, 2012. It addressed common core running records
which we learned over the summer in our Literacy class with Professor
Groth. The entry begins by discussing
how running records look different across grade levels. For example, K-2 you will see various check
marks on the paper marking if the word is correct. In the upper grades, 3-5, you will not see
any check marks. On Wednesday I was able to observe my third grade teacher giving a fluency
test to one of her students. She used a
running record and did not have any check marks. I later found out this was because the students
read more fluently and quicker the older they get.
As Jennifer states in the blog it is almost impossible to keep up with
all the words they get correct. So by
not placing a check mark after every correct word, the teacher is able to focus
more on the self corrects and mistakes throughout the reading. I really like running records and think they
provide a lot of information about a child’s reading ability.
One
of the things I thought was cool was the running records app for the Ipad. It
is called the Running Record Calculator App. Jennifer talks about how the app allows you to
keep track of the mistakes and record the calculations so you do not have to
spend as much time entering or writing the information down. Another cool aspect is you can also record the
students so you can go back and listen if the student was unclear or reading
too fast. The Ipad is a great way to also
integrate technology into literacy.
Since our society is so technology focused this is a great way to use
our resources if we have an Ipad available.
It helps reduce time spent calculating what the student missed which
allows more time for a teacher to meet with his or her students. When I observed my teacher she was in a time
crunch. She wanted to get through all 22
of her students, but realistically she only got to 5 in one day. Once she finished with a student she would
calculate everything right after. This
took time that could have been spent listening to other students.
Question: What
do you think about the app? Would you use it in your classroom?
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