Literacy notes for 10/19

These are a little sparse. Feel free to add on in the comments section!!!

Maika mentioned that if any of your students need appropriate clothes for school, check out or refer them to the clothes closet at Marshall High School.

Syntax= does it make sense?

Semantic= does it change the meaning?

Julia brought up a great way to teach silent 'e' It's called the bossy 'e'. Any time e comes after another vowel in a word, it forces the vowel to say its name (example: bit...bite, cat, cate)

We broke up into small groups and brainstormed ways to help students that struggle with reading strategies. I didn't get all of the info down, but we will revisit the posters we made next week. Here are some of the categories and details:

If the student struggles with:

Sight words: you can start a word wall, ring or dictionary so students can easily access these words.

Encourage students to look at the picture or surrounding text. Is it possible to determine the word from that context?

Student loses motivation:

Resasses the books the student is reading. Is it a "just right" book?

Give students movement breaks when possible.

Try to find and introduce books of interest to students.

Student struggles with vocabulary or context: use madlibs or other games.

Frontload vocabulary. Play with words and meanings (for example, the book "Eats shoots and leaves" Talk about different meanings of the same-sounding word (i.e. two/to/too)

Student lacks interest or parent support:

Teacher can pick an interesting book and do a book talk on it. This often triggers student interest.

Try to build and foster a community of readers and learners at school through book clubs, etc.

Suggest that the student brings home the books they're reading at school. That way they always have a book to read at home.

Give a lot of strategies, support and positive feedback!

Website Resources

Hey all, I've been muddling around on the good ol' internet and have found some of these websites helpful...

http://www.omsi.info/teachers/k8chemistry/resources.cfm

This is a part of a science curriculum that OMSI puts out. I know that none of us probably have the actual curriculum, but these resources seemed liked they might be valuable for doing science stuff later on. (If we ever really have science time... Oh Kip... I feel as though I've failed you.)

http://www.donorschoose.org/

I'm sure many of you have heard about this website, but it's pretty cool and I definitely plan on using it when I'm a teacher!

http://www.life.com/

I've had some teachers/books suggest this website to look at for photos you can share with your class or to make things like those emotion cards we read about in some book.

http://legacy.lclark.edu/dept/ccps/courage_future.html

I definitely plan on attending this during one of my first five years of teaching.

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/AtHomeAstronomy/

I liked some of these ideas as send home things that can be addressed in the classroom, but make science fit in somewhat! They would probably need to be adjusted and differentiated depending on your classroom community.

http://www.sandia.gov/ciim/ASK/documents/fsn-homeactivities.pdf

More easy at home experiments... Maybe send some home and have kids share their findings in class? If more than one kid did the same experiment, you could graph and write out the similarities and differences of what happened?

http://www.nonamecallingweek.org/binary-data/NoNameCalling_ATTACHMENTS/file/90-1.pdf?state=&type=antibullying

I have mostly looked at this in terms of the adaptations for lower grades and like the walk through idea. I think it depends on your classroom and school, but my mentor and I have done similar things with our class and it's been responded to really well. My mentor has made a big point when talking about bullying and other things that we're talking about "what happened" not "who did it" because one is appropriate for the whole class and one is appropriate for telling a teacher or adult who can help. Lots of discussion and role-playing has made activities like this pretty awesome.

Anti-bias in the classroom

Well, I don't know about everyone else feels, but today's social studies class brought up a lot of questions in my little brain about thinking, dealing and organizing an anti-bias classroom. Too many news items are coming up these days that highlight a need to talk about race and bias in America. I don't want to work in a classroom where these issues go unexplored. Yet I feel I lack the tools and vocabulary necessary to facilitate positive discussion.

An incident came up in my class last week during Reading Workshop. The children had just listened to the story "Amazing Grace" and were asked to rate the story. Many of the children were asked to rate this store on a scale of 1-5, the majority giving the book a low rating. However, the reasons they gave for their marks were rather lame, and my mentor teacher was trying to brainstorm more in-depth reasons with the students. At one point, she suggested that maybe some boys were not interested in the story because it was about a girl and maybe they weren't interested in girls. While this statement in itself was not intended to breed bias, it opened the door for biased response. One boy stood up and said "I know! Maybe people didn't like the character because she's Black and they don't like Black people. The children in the group were surprised by this comment, some shouting "that's racist!" My mentor teacher and I were both dumbfounded, and while she move on at that moment, so mentioned to me later that she would think about what to do.

Now, I feel this is a time when we could separate the statement from the child. He wasn't stating that this was his opinion. Yet there was something about the statement that pushed the comfort zone for a lot of people in the room. While we didn't have any African American children in the class, there were others who looked visibly shocked and upset. And anyways, just because there are no African American or Black children in the room, it doesn't mean this issue should go unaddressed. So basically, I'm wondering what you, my cohort mates, would have done in this situation.

If anyone is reading this and is interested in organizing some sort of round table/anti-bias workshop, let me know. I'd be glad to offer my house as a potential meeting spot. Also, does anyone know a person in the field who can give us some real, hands-on ideas on how to address anti-bias? I'm tired of talking about these things in abstract. It would be great if we could organized a speaker or workshop leader. Is there funding available for this???

let me know what you think, or if you have any stories to share,

Thanks!

Andrea

And We All Went To Heaven In A Little Rowboat...

...and there was nothing to fear, and nothing to doubt.

Thanks

I'm not sure if people will continue to look at this or not, but I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for being so supportive yesterday, and I that I really enjoyed looking at everybody's art yesterday too. What a talented bunch!!!! It's so neat to see the many different ways people can take and interpret an idea. I felt like we were able to break some new ground and open up a bit more yesterday. Thanks to Zalika for giving us the opportunity to do this.

It's a bummer that we'll be all split up next week, but we will reunite in the fall!!!!!

!

I am so blessed to be surrounded by all of you amazing people and having an instructor like Zalika. I know we're her favorites! ;) I feel like I have learned to be more patient with myself over these last few weeks. Having a child has helped too but I must say I am really impressed with everyone, really every single person in our cohort. I think we were grouped together for some special reason!! I haven't felt very supported in the professional field, and sure some of that is me (I am still acclimating to middle class culture) but a lot of the patience I am feeling is because I think of you, yes you, and I realize that we are all doing the best we can with what we have, where we are at now. I skated out a little fast for fear of crying in front of everyone. Tears of joy. I am excited about the fall and getting back to our group. I am sure the next two weeks will be a grand adventure but somehow, I think we would have had more fun if we had stuck together as a cohort! Anywho! Thank you all for all that you are. I am learning so much from everyone. Ditto to Zalika, see what a difference one person can make?

Thanks!

I just wanted to say that it's been really wonderful having all of you as classmates over the last 5 weeks. So many of your comments and blog posts have inspired me and challenged me to really examine and think deeply about my beliefs, values and ideas about education and society in general. So, thank you for that. Thank you for taking risks and supporting me when I got brave enough to take them. And a special thanks to Zalika for guiding us and giving us so much of yourself through your teaching. I really hope that we can continue to use this blog to support each other throughout the year and we can continue to discuss how to apply the things we have learned in this class to our future classrooms.