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.