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. 

http://www.slideshare.net/hellojenjones/fifty-shades-of-the-common-core-for-ela-revised 

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!

 

Focus Poetry in the classroom

In the blog Hello Literacy posted on October 23, 2012 Jones talks about focus poetry.  She provided resources from a book by Julie Ballew entitled, “Top Teaching” through scholastic.  You can find all the resources on the blog if you are interested in learning more about the lessons! Julie talks about focus poetry and how to integrate it into your classroom.  Focus poetry is a “program of shared reading and provides multiple opportunities to teach a wide variety of skills in a short amount of time each day.” Below is the template she uses for the lessons.  She will put up a poem and the students will go through the template and analyze/ write about the poem and what it means to them. 

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!

Making Connections: text to self, text to text, text to world

In my 3^rd 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!

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?

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?