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.

Brittany Bittner, Digital Stories

Over the past year I have really become interested in integrating technology and education. Through my job, I was given key experiences and ideas for doing so in the future. Therefore this project simply gave me hand-on experience actually using technology within a classroom and making a product. The children’s reaction was enough to prove that technology is the “new” literacy and should really be emphasized at all ages. The technology I chose to explore was digital story telling and visual/print literacy. I had heard and viewed several digital stories beforehand, but I had never made one on my own. I decided to use visual literacy because the students I work with at the Child Development Center often times can't read or write. They do engage in story telling and seem to enjoy being read to during group times, but they mainly express themselves through drawing. I read them the book "May There Always be Sunshine" by Jim Gill. We then discussed what they would also like there to always be in the world. I then had them illustrate their idea and record their voices into imovie using a microphone. Since I work in the College of Education tech center I completed the rest of the project there. I scanned the illustrations in and then matched the voices with the particular pictures. I also imported the song from the book and have that playing throughout the story. This fits in with my current definition of literacy. Digital stories are becoming very popular and can be done in multiple ways. It is a way for students to interact with stories, develop their own stories, add on to stories, work in groups, use technology, etc. In most grades literacy is emphasized. In early childhood retelling stories, adding onto to stories, playing with language, and using creative language are all essential. Digital stories can be used across the curriculum and incorporated into all grade levels. Multiple standards and benchmarks can be addressed depending on what subject the digital story is implemented in and the process. For examples having students view and recall details from a story will meet different benchmarks then having students create their own digital story and present it to the class. Depending on the grade level, classroom interests, technology experience, etc. digital stories can be used in a number of ways. Students would need to be familiar with what a digital story is and view several. Digital stories could be an option when creating and presenting projects or could be done as a whole class. These days literacy includes using technology competently and on many levels. In order to be successful in the growing world, these skills are important. The literacy aspect is drawing out information and being able to adapt to new ideas and technologies. Using digital stories allows students to be creative while giving them experience with technology. Digital stories can also foster typing skills, presentation skills, group work, movie making and editing, retelling stories, identifying beginning, middle, and end, concepts of print, etc. These are all areas also influenced and impacted by literacy.

March 20th Post - New Literacy Project

For my new literacies project I decided to do visual literacy using graphic organizing. I chose visual literacy because I am a visual learner and thought it would be interesting to learn more about it. I found that visual literacy is actually a really great tool for students to engage in high-order thinking. Visual literacy is a fun and different way for students to be assessed instead of a work sheet or a test. Visual literacy is videos, pictures, graphic organizers, images, basically anything represented graphically. My partner also used graphic organizing to present visual literacy and we were a little disappointed in it. We all know what graphic organizers are and most of us have used some form of them one time or another. We were excited about learning more about it because we thought there was some new and technology savvy way to do them...there's not. At least what we could find, without having to pay for a program, the graphic organizers we found were the same old worksheets that we had done in school. However, when presenting our projects to the different groups some people came up with ways that you could make graphic organizing different and more fun. My favorite suggestion was using on a smart board and having students up and interactively creating their own graphic organizer.

March 13th Post

I think that word walls are a great idea for ELL classrooms and beginning readers classrooms. I was able to learn a little more about them in Chapter five, where Tompkins talks about word recognition and high-frequency words. My CT has a “word wall” but it is not used to its full potential. She has a few high-frequency words on it but not anywhere near what it could have. The students don't seem to know it is there let alone use it. A couple times when a student has asked me for help on a word like together, I have looked up at the word wall to see if I can use it to help them...it didn't even have the word to and get on it!

For my small group lesson I have been thinking about doing something that will help the two students that I choose with comprehension. Things like word recognition, word identification, fluency, etc. This chapter really helped me jump start on what I want to do with those students to help them become better readers and writers.

February 28th Post

I really related to the chapter on Facilitating Comprehension from Tompkins. My first grade classroom has been really big on folklore lately. My CT is doing a whole unit on comparing and contrasting different versions of folklore. For example, they finished a unit on Little Red Riding Hood stories and now they just started a unit on Cinderella. They have read the Disney version, The Rough Phased Girl, and Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters. They are also planning on reading Yeh - Shen. Although I haven't seen her actually compare and contrast these stories with the students...I have just seen her read the stories to her. I would really be great to see how the students do with this type of higher-order thinking.
Natasha and I almost decided to do this same type of thing for our Language Arts lesson plan. We were going to compare and contrast different versions of The Three Little Pigs. We decided that because they were already doing so much of this with Mrs. Kibbey that they might get bored of it if we do it with them as well. We did how ever use a different version of The Three Little Pigs for our lesson plan, called The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. We then taught them about plot and had them act out the different parts of plot.