Blog #10

“Homework should not be about rote learning.  The best kind deepens student understanding and builds essential skills (Vatterott, 2010).”  With this in mind, homework should provide further practice and application of essential skills.  Homework should be an independently attainable task with minimal or no parent support.  It should have a clear purpose and demonstrate students learning. 

Meaningful homework should reinforce learned skills and be appropriate for each student. While homework is a typical thing for most classes, give the students some choice in how they want to demonstrate or practice their learning.  For example, if a class is studying nutrition give the students a homework menu of a variety of choices and ideas to practice and apply their learning.  Possible choices could include: create a healthy meal for your family, create a family workout plan, create a recipe book that includes a variety of nutritional meals, plan a day’s meal meeting all nutritional requirements, etc…  Homework is meaningful when it relates to their life and they can apply what they have learned.

                Current homework objectives tend to include practice what you have learned by completing worksheets and reading logs.  While these forms of homework can be helpful in a sense it can be rather limiting and meaningless.  Very few applications and connections can be made with such homework practices and may further “prove” to students that homework is meaningless.   Homework objectives should rather consists of practice and demonstrate understanding.  Do not let this constitute an extensive project to be completed in a week.  Homework should be at a level that students feel competent and confident in completing in a timely manner.  Students should be able to walk away from the homework with a sense of confidence, pride, and relevance.

                Feedback on homework should be provided in a timely fashion and in various modalities.  Feedback can come from teachers, peers, and self, so long as it is given in an appropriate way.  The sandwich effect is a good rule of thumb: Mention the positive, then move on to the next steps/things to improve on, and end with another positive.  If students are practicing skills wrong, it is crucial to talk with the students in a timely manner to fix the misunderstanding before it becomes “learned incorrectly”.

                Teachers should be clear from the very beginning on their purpose and expectation on homework.  Communication could be conducted in a variety of ways such as, parent newsletters, conferences, e-mail, and school/classroom website.  It’s also important to communicate if homework can be completed with the aide of technology. 

                If homework is going to be utilized in classrooms then it needs to be seen as meaningful practice.  This needs to start from day one and continued to be used as an application of skills and learning’s.

Blog #9

NON FICTION  Magazine “American Baby”

FICTION   Novel “Someone Like You”

·         Broken into segments ·         Subheadings for text ·         Pictures/Images ·         Has punch-outs for the reader to use and keep for future reference ·         Provides websites and additional information for the reader to go to/use ·         Colorful print ·         Larger text size ·         Fun quizzes/games for the reader to do ·         Bolded vocabulary with definitions ·         Provides technology connection ·         Written for a teen with common vocabulary and slang All of these are benefits to ELL students

·         Smaller print ·         Large amount of text ·         No pictures ·         Continuing story rather than broken into smaller pieces/stories ·         No color ·         Usually more challenging words – word choice can be difficult for students ·         No vocabulary/definitions provided

For high school students, non-fiction text is a lot easier for students to read because it is real life information.  Fiction text may be confusing for students because there may be cultural differences and there is usually no background information to help them understand a subject like many non-fiction texts have.  Fictional books are easier for elementary students because it is less in-depth and have less scientific words.  Non-fiction books are usually a difficult read because the word choice in the book is scientific and is extremely difficult to students.  Non-fiction books are extremely entertaining for students and usually have pictures for students to look at and are more colorful and entertaining to read.

Blog #8

What did the teacher do to promote learning?

To begin the lesson, the teacher went over the objectives for the students.  She wanted students to begin to inferring; however, she did not remind the students what inferring was.  She reviewed with students what reading strategies they should try and how they can use those strategies.  Before beginning to read the book, the teacher frontloaded the students with vocabulary that she that she thought they might not know. The teacher provided students with pictures that showed them a visual representation of the vocabulary words; however, she had all of the pictures on a piece of paper and expected students to know what each of the images were.   To help the students, the teacher also made connections to the students’ native country.  To help the students, the teacher read aloud as the student were following in their books, and she read out loud with an overhead and she underline each word as she read them.  Periodically she would stop and talk to the students about the passage that they had just read to see if they understand what the passage was saying, and how it relates to the story.  While she was doing this she was questioning students and putting them on the spot, and it seemed that a lot of the students were uncomfortable.  As the teacher was reading, she would stop and connect it to her background knowledge or to the students’ background knowledge.  She would ask students to connect to their background knowledge as well.               

What do you see the teacher do?

The teacher began the lesson by stating the objective.  Next she reviewed reading strategies with them.  Throughout the lesson the teacher encouraged students to talk.  After each passage she revisited important information from the text.  One time, the teacher asked the students to connect to their background knowledge.

What do you see the students do?

The students were thinking about strategies that they should use while reading and then they used these strategies as they went through the book.  The students looked at pictures on their own.  One student started to sing the birthday song, and another student joined in to help that student.

Reflect on reading and Video

Both the reading and the video talked about important components for dealing with ELL students.  The book talks about having clear objectives for ELL students, and in the video the teacher went over the objectives with the students.  The books talk about non-linguistic representation such as providing pictures for the students; however the pictures in the lesson were not labeled and were thrown all together on a piece of paper.  The books talks about going slower for ELL students to allow time for them to process, and it seemed like the teacher went really fast though the lesson.  The teacher connected the students to their native language of Spanish with the birthday song; however, it seemed to make the students uncomfortable. 

List essential components of the sheltered lesson

Clear objectives

Non-linguistic representation

Scaffolding

Blog #6

Upon examining the worksheet with information about (L) learning/word recognition and (A) acquisition/sociopsycholinguistic views that we received in class, I noticed that a lot of the activities could be labeled as both (L) and (A) depending on how you look at the activity.  In addition, many of the topics can be categorized differently based on the grade level that the activity is being done with.  A lot of the learning activities were things such as looking up words in the dictionary and dividing words into syllables; things that can all be done with a worksheet or with a simple teacher lecture and doing drills with the students.  With learning activities, students are practicing and doing exercises, but they do not have a purpose or are not given strategies.

                Acquisition activities involve talking, giving a purpose to what students are doing, and giving students strategies that they can use later.  If a teacher is correcting a student, that would be a learning activity; however, if a student is the one correcting another student that would be an acquisition activity.   The students are able talk about the correction and are providing a purpose to why they are correcting their peers. 

Blog #7

            For the running records, I noticed that both students, Amani and Wendy, had a lot of meaning errors.  Both students are in Fifth grade, and each had some difficulty reading their book.

Amani read “Come and Play” and repeated a lot of the words that he was reading.  He had some pronunciation errors which is primarily due to English not being his first language.  A lot of his errors were related to meaning because he was really focusing on reading visually.  While reading “my doll and I are teachers”, he actually read “my doll, my doll and I are, a, are tee/tee-ches”.  This sentence does not make sense at all and he did not notice that the sentence did not make sense and did not try to correct it.

                Next teaching points for Amani are to frontload him with vocabulary before he reads a book.  This will help him understand words he may not have previously known such as firefighters and firehouse.  Another teaching point is to have Amani do a picture walk of the book before he reads it.  While he was reading he did not look at the pictures at all, and he might have been able to pronounce airplane had he seen the picture.  Another teaching point is to provide a book with high frequency words that include his sight words.  The last teaching point that I suggest is to find books that are interesting for the student; the book about a doll did not seem interesting for Amani.

                Wendy read at an instructional level of 90-94% accuracy which was wonderful to see.  She struggled reading a few words that she probably had not encountered before.  She struggled with past tense; for example, she read marked as markded.  She grouped words together in a different way which made it difficult to understand her while she read aloud. 

                Next teaching points for her would be to work with tenses to help her understand how they are used.  I would also work with fluency by reading fluency passages together where the teacher and student swoop the words.  I would sit with the student and do it together to ensure that she is comfortable with the concept.  Another teaching point would be to frontload her with important words from the text.  Diary and huge yard sale are words that are extremely important to the understanding of the book.  To help her with this I would practice diary writing for a week so that she understands what it looks like to write in a diary.  When working with the diary assignments, I would teach letter activities such as practicing the ending to a letter.  The final teaching point that I would work on with her is how to read money amounts because this is an area where she was unsure.

Blog #2

I received traditional writing instruction throughout my education.  When I first learned to write, my teachers taught me how to form letters.  I remember having paper with a capital letter on the top line and a lowercase letter right next to the capital letter.  We then would have to practice writing that letter for the rest of the paper.  The papers that I wrote as a child were graded on “conventions in handwriting, spelling, punctuation, and organization” (30).  To learn spelling words, we were given a typed list of words that we took home to memorize for a test at the end of the week.  When we wrote papers, the teacher read over them and corrected them.  The exchanging of papers with other students began in high school.  All of these instructional methods fit into traditional writing instruction.

Blog #4

For this assignment, I chose to read a book about a puppy written in Korean.  I knew that this book was about a puppy because there was a puppy on every page.  I felt that the book was talking about the different things that a puppy needs because I also have a puppy and a lot of the items in the book that were in the pictures with the puppy are things that my puppy has. 

            To make meaning out of the book, I looked at the pictures to see if I could understand what the book was talking about through the pictures.  Next, I looked for words that were repeated throughout the book to see if I could figure out what the words were based on the context of the pictures.  On the “lift the flap” section of every page, it had the same words repeated each time.

            The implications for me as a teacher are ones that will stick with me.  First, teachers need to recognize that too much text will be overwhelming for students learning a new language and will often lead to frustration.  Teachers should choose books that have words or phrases that are repeated throughout the text.  Next, teachers should provide images or pictures for students to look at to help them create meaning before they read.  Teachers should also look for text/books where students already have background knowledge on the subject or can relate it to something in their life. 

            Strategies that I used were looking at the pictures, trying to make connections to what I already know, searching for repeated words, looking for words that are similar to the language I know.  If I knew someone in the class who was an expert at the language, I would have asked them to help me out as well.

            While going through and reading my book I became increasingly frustrated because I did not understand what was happening in the book at all.  I could guess at what I thought was happening; however, there was no way for me to actually know what the text said.  I can only imagine this feeling being multiplied for my ELL students in class.  These students are often given grade level text which most of the time has no pictures or images to help students read and make sense of the material.  ELL students usually do not have someone who can help them read and understand and usually are embarrassed or feel awkward asking for help.  This assignment has opened my eyes to the challenges of teaching to ELL students.

Blog #5

The two books that I chose to review and examine the cultural aspects that could affect cultural understanding are Contemporary Living and a recipe for Injera (Ethiopian flatbread) .  The students will be reading a chapter on Dating and Marriage in the Contemporary Living book.  This chapter looks at American culture’s dating and marriage traditions.  An ELL student from another county may start to read our customs and not understand them at all.  For example, an ELL student from India might be confused that people find their significant other on the internet because a lot of people in their culture have their significant other chosen from them by their parents.  In addition, their dating is considered courtship and is extremely short and so they might find it extremely strange that people in the United States will date for years and often will live together before getting engaged or married.  Another area where students can be confused is by the wedding ceremony itself.  In India, wedding ceremonies last multiple days and the bride and groom hardly see each other, where in the U.S., ceremonies can be done in as little as five minutes.  Another possible confusion for ELL students is the sexuality of the couple and the roles of each person based on their gender.  There are many ways that I can help students with this unit such as showing a video on dating and marriage to help the students understand the cultural aspects of dating and marriage here in the United States.  Next I will give students a graphic organizer and have them find similarities and differences between their customs and American customs when it comes to dating and marriage. 

The next book the students will read is a recipe for Injera an Ethiopian flatbread.  Students in the culinary class really struggle when a recipe is from a different culture because often times the units of measure are different.  For example, most cultures use Metric while we use U.S. system of measurement.  Another possible confusion for the students is that the ingredients used in other cultures may not be familiar to my students.  The recipe that we will use for Injera will use Teff flour which is an ingredient that most of my students have never heard of before and therefore have never tasted.  The use of different ingredients is something that will confuse students and often scare them away from trying new food.  The taste of the food is something that will be different for ELL students because they will be used to tasting food from their home country and in the Unites States we have our own unique style and taste of food.  Another thing that could potentially confuse ELL students is serving size as well as serving style.  In Ethiopia a lot of the food is served family style and eaten with fingers.  Serving sizes are often small compared to what people are used to in the United States.  To help ELL students understand this unit I will access students’ background knowledge about the food served in their country.  If we were talking about a religious celebration I will talk to the students about the type of food they serve for the celebration and then I will talk about the type of food that we serve here in the U.S.  I will then have the students create the food dish so that students can feel, taste, and smell what the food actually tastes like.

Blog # 3

There are many important ties between oral language and the process of learning to read.  Everyday, children experience new things in their life and learn new vocabulary.  The connection between how these words sound and what noise letters make in a word will be very important when the students start to learn phonics. “Decades of research summarized by the National Reading Panel (2000) demonstrates that young children need to be able to hear and recognize the sounds of language, and its vocabulary, in order to learn to read” (Learning Through Listening, 2011).  Using phonological awareness, students can recognize the sound each letter makes to be able to sound out a word they are reading, so then they can read the word in their head.  This link between the understanding of oral language and the development of reading skills should be an important part of the teaching of reading to students.  Teachers should make sure that they are developing the students’ listening skills prior to and concurrently with the development of reading skills.  According to Learning Through Listening (2011), “reading comprehension critically depends on the recognition of words and ideas in the context of what has already been learned. That is, comprehension relies on connecting to general background knowledge, previously learned vocabulary, the concepts and principles that tie words together, the oral discourse structures for telling stories, participating in conversation, giving directions, etc.”  The most important way for students to obtain this prior knowledge is through the learning of oral language.  Therefore, the more adept a student is at understanding and manipulating oral language, the easier that student will learn reading.  Overall there is a strong connection between oral language and the reading process.  When students are able to make a connection between oral language and reading they will be able to comprehend more and thus will have a greater understanding.

Source:

http://www.learningthroughlistening.org/Listening-A-Powerful-Skill/The-Science-of-Listening/Learning-Through-Listening-in-the-Digital-World/How-New-Technologies-are-Changing-the-Relationship-Between-Literacy-and-Listening/147/

Blog #1

I discussed with our instructional coach her views on teaching literacy and she had a lot to say.  To begin she thought that teaching literacy needs to be done cross curricular so that students understand that reading and writing can be used in every class and throughout life, not just in their English class.  Teachers in every class should be teaching literacy to their students and the vocabulary that they use should be consistent across subjects.  For example, students should hear the word genre in every class when teachers are talking about different writing types.  Teacher’s calling it something different can confuse students.  Teachers within the school can talk with each other about the literacy being taught in their classroom so that each class can enhance the learning done in the previous classroom.  If students are learning to write a persuasive text for their Political Science class, they can also be looking at persuasive texts in their English class to learn about strategies to best teach the subject.  Along these lines, I talked with my co-worker, Mrs. S., about her philosophies about teaching literacy.  Since she is a Family and Consumer Sciences teacher, there is little outright instruction on literacy in her classroom.  Mrs. S. does think that something needs to be done about the literacy level of her students.  She regularly assigns written and oral reports for student projects and tries to help the students improve their reading and writing skills.  When I asked her about if she has conferenced with other English teachers in the school about ways to enhance the literacy instruction value of her assignments, she said she had not but that it was a great idea.  We both agreed that teachers across subjects should help each other develop lessons that improve student literacy skills.