assessment

I took away a ton of great ideas from the textbook, Classrooms That Work by Allington and Cunningham, as I was reading about assessment. I loved how the textbook provided exact copies of charts and checklists that can be used for assessment purposes. Finding appropriate ways to assess students can be a very difficult task for new teachers, but I feel that the textbook provided very useful tips. One assessment that really stood out to me was the writing assessment. The article says to have students write about a prompt in the first week of school, middle of the year and end of the year. Then, the students analyze their progress as writers and gain confidence from seeing the progress they have made. This reminded me a lot of the Reading and Me assessment in one of the earlier chapters of the book. I also liked the idea of assessing students' attitudes and interests towards reading frequently during the year in order to provide them with the best possible individual assistance.
How do you think we as teachers can make sure to continuously assess our students on an individual level rather than only assessing them once at the beginning of the year because there is not enough time in a school day?

Here is a cute idea for assessing a student's reading material
http://acrucialweek.blogspot.com/2011/08/assessment-linky-party.html

Real Life Reading Inquiry

Real Life Reading Inquiry

When reading the article “Letting Go of Letter of the Week”, I became very interested in the different strategy they used to teach reading. I did not believe that students could use informational print from their environment that they already “know how to read” in order to read other words. I conducted a study with a six-year-old boy to see whether or not he could actually read the environmental print and therefore could use chunking to read other words, or if he simply recognized the print only when it was seen in its usual context (i.e. M on the McDonald’s sign and the red and yellow colors included). I studied his ability to read movie titles, his name, restaurant names, and cereals.

I had confirmed my hypothesis that children could not read new words based on familiar chunks from words they know after my very first test. The article gave the example that because students could “read” the word Burger King when seeing the logo, they could use that knowledge to know “-ing” when they see it at the end of a different word. I will not provide a last name for sense of confidentiality but I must provide the first name of the little boy I worked with in order to describe my first test. The boy’s name was Tanner. Based on the article of “Letting Go of Letter of the Week” I should be able to teach Tanner how to read the word “tan” by using his experience and knowledge of his own name. Tanner can read and write his name, but when asked to read the word “tan” he broke down and could not read it. On one hand I was honestly surprised that he could read his 6-letter name but not read a 3-letter word that starts with the exact same chunk of letters. On the other hand, I was not surprised because I never believed the teaching strategy discussed in the article could work, at least not for all students.

The way I tested Tanner for all the words I used in my study was by first showing him environmental print and asking him to read the words. He could “read” the environmental print words with 100% accuracy. Immediately following an environmental print word, I wrote down the exact same word in black ink on a plain piece of paper and asked him to read the word. For example, I would show him a box of Lucky Charms cereal and ask him to read the words on the box, then I would write the word Lucky Charms on a piece of paper and ask him to read the word. Not to my surprise, he could read all the environmental print but could not read one single word I had written on the paper. I used McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A (his favorite restaurant) for the two restaurants to read. I held up the case for The Little Mermaid because that is his favorite movie and asked him to read the words on the case. He told me it said The Little Mermaid but then he could not read the words when I wrote them on paper. I went over several different words with Tanner, including the word Cars (hoping to relate to the movie) for a simpler word.

I was really fascinated during this study and the information I obtained is very useful to know when teaching someday. In the article the teacher argues that all her students can read after they all recite the words of environmental print accurately. However, I know now that children cannot actually read the words in environmental print. I loved the concept of using familiar words from the environment to teach students how to read, but I just don’t understand how I could make it work in my classroom someday.

*Most of my research was based on the information in the article “Letting Go of Letter of the Week” by Bell and Jarvis. A second source that I used information from to conduct my study was “Reading Is All Around Us: Using Environmental Print to Teach Beginning Literacy Skills” by Dede Dodds. 

 

vocabulary

I really enjoyed reading the articles about vocabulary this week because they caused me to reminisce on my own experiences with vocabulary as a student. All I can remember about learning vocabulary was doing the vocabulary workshop textbook worksheets every single day. We had to define the words, use them in sentences, find synonyms and antonyms and use them in matching questions. The worksheets in our vocabulary workbooks were dreadful and boring. I remember always memorizing the words to pass the vocabulary tests and then never using them or understanding them again. The article "Vocabulary Lessons" makes a great argument about the importance of teaching vocabulary in a meaningful way. I like how they discussed using a word wall that the students actually created. When the students come across a new word in their readings, they get to write it down and stick it on the word wall themselves. The STAR method (select, teach, activate, and revisit) for providing explicit instruction is also a great thing for teachers to use. Teaching students how to utilize a dictionary is also a good point that was mentioned in the article. I know several students are too intimidated by using a dictionary because it is so huge and they don't even know how to use one. By teaching them, teachers can help students to gain independence. As we have read in several other articles during this class, exposing students to a wide range of literature is crucial. The article discusses how crucial it is in terms of vocabulary development.

Did any of you all have to do boring vocabulary worksheets all throughout Elementary school? Or, did you all have memorable experiences with learning new words like some of the strategies taught in these articles?


This bulletin board is specifically for math word vocabulary but I loved the idea of how easily accessible it is to students in the classroom.

teaching comprehension

I've always known that it's very important to teach students comprehension skills, but the thought of having to teach such skills makes me nervous. I struggled with comprehension my whole life and I never had someone explicitly teach me the skills for how to comprehend text. The article by Pardo explores every single aspect of teaching comprehension and the information was very eye opening to me. I never realized how insanely complicated the process of comprehension is until I read this article. I'm nervous about being able to teach my students how to comprehend text because it is such a difficult thing to teach. However, I am thankful that all the readings this week gave me some great ideas as to how I can incorporate teaching comprehension skills in my classroom.
Has anyone else ever felt nervous about being able to successfully teach comprehension?

Here are some cute comprehension games that can be played with elementary students.
http://www.education.com/activity/comprehension/

Poetry Performance activity

 Poetry Performance

Poetry Performance is using poetry activities to help students develop fluency.

Monday: The students should form small groups. They will go to the library and find a poem that all of the students would like to perform at the end of the week. An approved poem needs to be copied for each student in the group. The teacher needs to introduce and review the purpose and procedures for poetry performance. Invitations to the poetry party that will be on Friday will be sent home on this day.

Tuesday: Each student needs to read the poem individually then discuss the poem with his or her group. As the students read they will need to mark words that they do not know in order to discuss them with the group and add them to the word wall. 

Wednesday: The group needs to be responsible for assigning the role to each group member. The students also need to discuss the cadence and prosody throughout the poem. A rubric will be presented to the students for guidelines that they all need to follow in their performance.

Thursday: As the teacher circulates, the groups need to get together with other groups to practice performing their poetry.

Friday: Have a poetry party, turning the classroom into a poetry house, for all of the student to celebrate all that they have learned during poetry week. Invite parents to the poetry party to show their appreciation for the student’s poetry accomplishments. Have each group perform in front of the class following the rubric.

Here is a sample rubric for incorporating performance poetry into your classroom:
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson78/poetrubric.

All about fluency

The article by Deeney makes a fantastic point about the inaccuracy of one-minute fluency measures. I agree with her in that they are helpful for identifying students who cannot read accurately and quickly but I still think they are highly flawed. We all saw for ourselves in class last Thursday when reading about viruses that speed and accuracy are far from the only 2 things that constitute a fluent reader. Several of us admitted after reading it "fluently" that we had absolutely no idea what we had just read. That activity and this article proves the argument that comprehension must be a part in defining fluency. By using the limited one-minute measure assessment, teachers are completely missing out on the important factor of reading comprehension that creates a legitimately fluent reader.

One great thing I took away from Cunningham and Allington in this week's readings was how to get my struggling readers to read easy books without insulting them and embarrassing them. I definitely have the same concerns/questions that other teachers do about giving some of my students lower reading level books. I worry they will get picked on or made fun of by their classmates or feel discouraged because I've given them easier reads. It was very helpful to get some ideas as to how to overcome that concern. Also for the textbook reading this week, I loved the concept of fluency development lessons. It reminded me of the 10 important words lesson idea because it's something teachers can use every day in the classroom. I definitely will plan on using FDLs in class everyday because after the 3 readings this week, I now understand how crucial it is to incorporate fluency into reading education.

Will you consider using FDLs in your classroom every day?
What are your thoughts about choral reading and echo reading from the chapter in our textbook this week?


This article provides some more activities that you can use in the classroom. There are different activities for each component of the fluency definition.
http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/fluency.html

making words and ten important words plus

The ten important words plus activity describes in the article by Yopp and Yopp is genius. I think this activity is unique and outstanding because of all the different strategies it incorporates for learning vocabulary words - reading them, recording them, talking about them, using them in their written summaries, and thinking about them in alternative ways (Yopp and Yopp, 2007). It's common knowledge that repeated exposure to an unfamiliar word will help students to eventually learn the word, but this article incorporates repeated exposure with multiple types of exposure. I honestly would not change anything about the activity and I see myself trying to use it in my classroom someday for sure. I also really love the Making Words activity discussed by Cunningham and Cunningham. Playing the game in class was a blast and I'll definitely be using it in my classroom on a daily basis. I loved both of the articles this week because they provided practical ideas that I will use in my classroom.


Check out this website for some more fun word building activity ideas...
 http://www.reading-activities.com/word_building__activities