April 10th Post - Balanced Literacy

I put into the balanced literacy group for our presentations. To tell you the truth I wasn't sure I knew much about it. To take an educated guess I would have said that balanced literacy is being able to balance and incorporate all types of the education spectrum into the literacy realm. What I found out is that balanced literacy is a framework designed to help all students learn to read and write effectively. The program was created and makes the statement that all students can learn to read and write. This balance between reading and writing allows students to receive the teaching needed in order to read grade level status, while allowing students to work at a level that is not frustrating for them. There are several different models currently in schools today.

I read about a study done in 1998, I believe, about the improvements that the students showed after having a full year of balanced literacy instruction. The students had more fluent reading and writing skills and they were more confident in their work as a whole. They com paired these students to the students which did not have this literacy instruction and the differences were outstanding. All in all balanced literacy is something I would use in my classroom, but one that I would use as a resource and a helpful aide, but not the only source of literacy in my classroom.

Word Activity, Basal Reader

I found the Basal Readers to be a mediocre resource. It had some good ideas and stories, and seemed to be laid out well. It also had some disadvantages. I found it to be somewhat difficult to navigate through the teacher's edition, however the student edition seemed fairly straightforward. Another disadvantage was that they are expensive! There are a lot of cheaper resources out there. With that being said, I would probably use the Basal Readers if a school district had them, but I would not use every part of them. I would still want to incorporate my own ideas and activities into my lessons.

I REALLY enjoyed the homograph and homonym riddles. Whenever I solved one that I found difficult, I had a great sense of achievement. I know it is rather silly, because I didn't really "achieve" that much with these riddles, but nevertheless it was fun. I think activities like these might be great for some kids, but frustrating for others. I think having some easy ones mixed in may help alleviate this problem for kids that struggle with these riddles.

Guest Speaker - Autism

I thought the guest speaker had some great ideas and tricks that will really work in the classroom. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. I have an autistic cousin and I felt like the speaker even helped me gain insight into what was going on with his life. My cousin loves football, and could tell you absolutely anything about any player on his favorite teams. He is really enthusiastic professional athletes in general. It always seemed odd to me that he was about to recall obscure facts about individual football players, and all their statistics, yet he struggled with some things that are very basic to me.

If you are interested in learning more about Autism, I found the documentary "Autism is a World" to be very profound. I watched it about a year ago after finding it on a library shelf. It was the story of an autistic girl, written and "narrated" by herself. She had an excellent way with words on paper, but she could hardly speak or otherwise express herself verbally or physically, so she wrote much of the documentary, and had someone narrate it.

April 3rd Post - Basal and Vocabulary

I have to admit that I had always had bad ideas and feelings about the Basal reading programs. After reading Tompkins chapter 10 about them and discussing them in class I have a little more positive outlook on them. As Natasha and I looked at our first grade program book we were amazed at the amount of detail that was in them and all the ideas they give you to do a whole week of lessons on. After seeing this we realized that you wouldn't have to be an actual teacher to follow and teach the basal programs. They spell out everything for you, it's almost like, as a teacher, you wouldn't even have to think or put in any of your own creativity. In Tompkins it says, “commercial publishers tout basal reading programs as complete literacy programs, but most teachers adapt them to meet their students' needs and use them in conjunction with other instructional approaches” (Tompkins 344). This eased my nerves to know that a lot of teachers don't just rely on the basals, they use other resources and tailor them to the students in their classroom. I think that the basal is a wonderful tool and resource to have in your classroom, but I would never encourage anyone to just do the basal and follow it religiously.

We don't use the basal reading program in my CT's classroom, but she does do a lot of work on vocabulary. One of the activities that she does, which I really enjoy, is word scrambles. When they learn a new word, usually one that has to do with a theme (they learned president on president's day) they get each individual letter in that word and try to make new words out of it. For example, when they were learning about animals and their characteristics they learned the word habitat. They were given each individual letter in habitat and then had to think of as many words that they could make from it. Like: at, hat, bat, it, bit, hit, etc. The students really get into it and then as a large group my CT calls on the students and writes on the board all the words that they came up with.

March 27th Post - Autism

The guest speaker that we had come in on Thursday really gave me some insight onto how to deal with behavioral students like autism students. I had a little boy in my preschool class a couple years ago that had autism. When he first started it was pretty rough, I have never had to deal with something like that in my life. But then he started seeing therapists and really started to improve. Transitions became much easier for him and he started to become a part of our classroom family. One day he shocked us all...during group time we teach the children about shapes, colors, the alphabet, numbers, animals, etc. He would never sit with us during this time and would insist on playing with toys off by himself. We on this particular day we were going over the shapes. We would point to each one and say, “what is it?” The class would respond, “square” or whatever shape it was. We continued doing this on a poster board with all the shapes. Later that day this little boy with autism was sitting in front of the shapes poster pointing to each shape and saying, “What is it? Square. What is it? Circle.” He went through the whole poster like this and got every single one of them correct, it was amazing, he really was listening even though we didn't think he was!

I don't think that we have any students in my class right now that have autism. We have a lot of behavioral issues in the class. And although my CT attempts to address these in a affective way, she has a hard time with being consistent and focusing only on the “bad kids.” For example, in her class the students have a hard time with blurting out a lot. Although the whole class has this problem, some more than others, she seems to focus her negative feedback only on two boys in the class. I realized this was a problem when I did my reflection for the LA lesson plan and I started counting how many times each student blurted out during the lesson, it was shocking!

Presenter

I thought it was great to have an outside guest in the classroom. However, I did not agree with all his ideas. For example, he suggested having the class divided into teams. I just feel that this will increase competition within the class and could carry over into other areas. I feel this would happen in both early and upper elementary classrooms. I think it is more beneficial to have the class working together as a whole. That way no individual or individuals are blamed or pointed out to the group. I just don't believe in fostering unnecessary, negative competition when it doesn't need to be. I also wished that he had talked more about intrinsic regulation and how to foster that within a classroom. It seems that students should not only be working toward rewards, but actually wanting the outcome or the responsibility. I feel this is much more important and I was hoping for more tips on how to implement that. Overall, it was great to hear another person's opinion and research presented. I was able to incorporate some of his ideas into my overall teaching philosophy for the future.

Vocabulary Development

It seems that in 2nd grade vocabulary isn't stressed very much. At this point it is simply about getting ideas onto paper and using the correct grammatical methods. It seems that students and teacher are more concerned with spelling words correctly in the early elementary grades. I feel it is still important to use a wide range of vocabulary with children throughout the day. This enhances their vocabulary and allows them to draw upon unfamiliar words within books. My teacher has a dictionary that the children can use when trying to figure out an unfamiliar word while reading. I have found that most students will ask an adult or a neighbor. In the beginning of the year, I did notice a bulletin board labeled "Overused words." It was a graveyard for those words and the children were told to "try" and not use them. I noticed the teacher would circle them in their work and encourage them to think of new words. This can be very beneficial when attempting to expand students' vocabularies verbally and written.