Response to "Writing Poems" on Reading Rockets

The video I watched was about a second grade class and their experiences with writer’s workshop.  Each student was asked to create a poem and then encouraged to share it with the class after they went through the crucial steps of drafting and revising.  A part of this video I really liked was the teacher.  First, she was enthusiastic when reading out loud to her class and seemed to fully believe in the importance of making writing “real”.  I liked how she also touched on the fact that reading and writing go hand in hand.  A part of the video said that "Good writers and good readers" and I firmly believe this.  I also liked how she would sit by the students and have them read their poems to her and how she would offer positive feedback.  At one point she says, “I really like your poem.  You used the same word a lot, but it did not make me want to stop reading”.  Providing comments like these to her students encourages them to keep writing and keep sharing their work, which is very important.  Also, I liked how the teacher let her students sprawl out around the classroom.  When the video showed students working on their poems they were not at their desks or sitting in chairs, but rather tucked in corners or laying on the floor.  Further, I like how she pushes her students to stay away from the “tired” words such as “pretty” or “beautiful” and encourages them to try their hardest to think of different words when they want to use the "tired" words.  This technique paired with reading literature with extensive vocabulary will benefit the students and ultimately create creative writers with a rich vocabulary set.  Overall, I really enjoyed watching this teacher at work and seeing her ideas played out in her classroom.  I plan on doing reader’s workshop in my classroom someday and this video further proved its importance.

Video:

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing/

Reflection on the Video, "Writing Poems" on readingrockets.org

When I first began watching this video, I was very surprised with the fact that these students were second graders.  They seemed to be advanced students as they knew how to develop very authentic poems with correct rhyme scheme.  I like the idea of having the students write poems.  When I was in elementary school I loved to write poems, this was because it was writing I could do that expressed myself and was unique to me.  I think this is very important in the classroom, because often times students are proctored to write about subjects that they have no interest.  To be able to have children excited about writing is something that is very important in order for them to stay engaged.  The video talked about the importance of writing and then reading their work out loud to their peers.  This helps students to get feedback on mistakes, or enables them to identify mistakes on their own.  When students have a positive attitude about writing they are likely to carry that attitude out for quite some time.  That is why it is so important for students to be able to enjoy the writing they are doing.  When students are writing poems they are being exposed to one of the importances of writing which is being able to express yourself.  Some students may not understand the reason for writing, but it is important to instill in students that writing is important and something that is used in every day life.  Giving students the free-range to write about what they like is a good way to engage as well, for if they are proctored one-hundred percent of the time the task of writing starts to become mundane.  I think the teacher did an amazing job engaging her students by having them express themselves, and therefore lead them to discover the importance of writing.

Reading Lessons

Kate, Henry, and Jimmy are the focus students I chose to work with for my two small reading lessons.  From observing in my classroom and talking with my mentor teacher, I concluded that each of these students would benefit from working in a small group.  For example, Kate is shy and often times very quiet during class discussion.  She rarely raises her hand to answer questions and only talks to the classmates that sit around her.  Next, I have noticed that Henry lacks confidence when asked to complete written work.  He often questions himself and worries too much if he is correct or not.  Sometimes he will not turn in work just because he is nervous to fail an assignment.  Jimmy has a brother in the classroom that I often see him competing with.  They share typical brotherly behavior such as competing to get higher grades, playing football the best at recess, and even racing to the lunchroom.  Competition is necessarily a bad thing, but I have seen Jimmy become discouraged when his brother “beats” him at something.  These students could all benefit from working with me with a smaller group of students.  I think Kate will be able to open up more and share her ideas aloud to her classmates, Henry will gain confidence by having me help if need be, and Jimmy will be pulled away from his brother.    

My mentor teacher also helped me determine the topic of both my small reading lessons.  We decided that it would be most beneficial for these students to work on text structures in expository texts and stick with the same topic over the span of two short lessons.  Previously, students have been learning about text features in informational texts such as bold and italic words and headings.  These particular students were struggling with identifying these features in different expository texts, so I thought that text structures and cue words would make them more comfortable with informational texts all together.  During these two lessons, students will be looking at different passages of each type of text, highlighting different cue words, writing their own passages, and filling out graphic organizers.  At the end of my lessons students will be able to pick out key words and phrases that will help them identify the different text structures (description, sequence, comparison, problem/solution, and cause/effect) of expository texts.

Example of Student Work

When I was working with my target student I had her draw me a picture.  After she drew me a picture I had her write a sentence explaining the picture.  She drew me a picture of her and in the picture she was holding two dolls.  So underneath her drawing she wrote the following: "I lki to pLa DoLs." Which is translated to: "I like too play dolls."  The elementary school I am placed at is an urban school and my target student is a struggling student, thereforeI was not surprised with the results of having the student write a sentence.  By observing what she wrote, it is clear that she understands that a sentence moves from left to right.  It also appears that she realizes that sentences begin a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark.  These two indications are examples of having awareness of concepts of print.  What is also shown by this example is that the student has phonological awareness.  Even though every word is not spelled correctly, there are letters that are present in the sentence that are the appropriate sound for the words she is trying to write.  This shows me that she is able to match a letter with its sound.  This student is in need of much more practice and instruction, but has the beginning steps of understanding concepts of print and formulating sentences while matching letters to sounds.  I think it is very imperative that this student continues to work on matching sounds to letters and creating words.

(Picture sample of work was taken but could not be formatted properly to be seen in this document)

Small Reading Lesson Plans

For my small reading lesson plans I decided that I wanted to work with students that were struggling in order to help them develop their reading skills that were lacking.  When I asked my teacher who she thought would be best for me to do this with, she directed me to two students who I thought would be perfect for these lesson plans.  While observing these two individual students over the past several months, I have seen that these students are able to comment on their favorite characters in stories, but they are not able to understand what the main point of the story is or the main events that occur in the story.  Basically these two students are lacking in their overall reading comprehension.  Since they are only in kindergarten, they are not able to read long stories to themselves, so they are expected to listen to stories that are read to them daily.  It is important for the students to listen so that they are able to comprehend what is happening in the story since they are unable to read the story to themselves.

Since I want to focus on the students' comprehension, I will read a story to the two students called Love is a Family by Roma Downey.  Before I begin reading, I will explain to the students that I want them to be thinking about who their favorite is while I read the story and that I will want them to explain to me why the character selected is their favorite.  After I am done reading them the story I will have them draw me their favorite character and tell me why.  I am expecting that by doing this the students will be focussing heavily on the characters in the story and not necessarily the events in the story or what is actually happening.

The next week I will take these same students and read them the same story.  This time before I begin reading I will tell the students that I want them to be thinking about everything that is happening in the story.  By prompting them in this way, my goal is to have them really focus on the storyline and the major events in the story.  After I have finished reading the story I will have the kindergarteners draw me three events from the story: something that happened at the beginning, middle, and end and then explain to me what they are and why they think they are important.  My goal with this task is for students to be able to think about books as the whole picture and try and grasp meaning from the story.

Writing Video Response

I wanted a video on a class of 2nd grade students who were going through a "writing adventure" or the writers workshop.  This program has a tight link between writing and reading, and also making writing real for the students. This teacher talks about how a lot of teachers weren't teaching writers, but the teachers that were teaching writing had students who had better writers.  The students start out by planning their writing, by asking questions about what they want to write about.  They then move onto the next step which is drafting.  The students sit by themselves and begin their own stories, most kids work alone but their teacher is always there to help and move them towards the next step of writing, revising.  The examples of student writing was awesome, it was so advanced for students their age and it is great that they are able to share their writing with their teacher aloud and then have her comment back on what they were writing about.  Some examples sounded somewhat poetic which I thought was great.  Their teacher gives them lots of ways to edit their writing (the last stage of writing). Literature comes in at this point too, and they learn different ways to write words so that they aren't using "tired" words.  These tired words are words like pretty when they could be using better words like beautiful, etc.  She tells her students that if they really feel they need to use a tired word they better have thought about every other option!  The part the student's love most about their writers workshop is sharing with their stories.  Research shows that peer discussion helps them to become better writers too, which I think is so interesting because I know as a student I was always so scared to share my writing with my classmates but these students are so confident in reading what they wrote and it is awesome to know that this helps them to become better writers in the long run.  Writing is hard for students regardless, especially these 2nd grade students,  it is new to them and a process they are learning but writers workshop helps this process become easier for them.  It has a structured approach and a great teacher to help them, so in this process they are learning the skills and seeing that learning is fun!  This helps them become life-long writers in the words of their teacher, it helps them become comfortable with writing.  I think overall this program is really nice, instead of just sending kids off to write and never really talking about it with them these students are able to discuss their work with both their teacher and their peers and get feedback and become comfortable with writing.  Not only that, they begin to enjoy writing and see it as something that is fun and exciting.  I love that when students become better writers they also become better readers, this makes me realize how much I have to focus on writing when I am teaching so that my students can be both great writers and great readers!  

Video:
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing/

Parent Letter

Dear Tina and Steve,

Your son Levi is an excellent student, more specifically an excellent reader.  We have recently done some reading testing and for a Kindergarten student, your son is reading at a reading level 2, which is second grade level.  Since the majority of our class is still at a Kindergarten level, Levi is not getting as much practice as he should with his reading level.  Although Levi is an excelling student, I would love to work with him more one on one on fluency at the second grade level as opposed to fluency at the Kindergarten level which is much different.  Fluency is the way that we read things, so the way our voice sounds when we read (not robotic sounding), how it changes for different punctuation, and just practicing reading at his level of reading.  In order to do this, I would like to work on teaching Levi high-frequency words that he doesn't know yet.  I also want to try a few things with Levi such as having him read the higher level text quietly to himself before reading it out loud to me and also choral reading with a few of the other students who are at the same reading level as him.  I would also love to try Readers Theater with Levi.  Readers Theater is when students are given a script and are reading for a specific character, since they are "acting" out this character they are practicing reading with emotion, I am going to do this with that same group of excelling students that I was talking about before.  I think all of these different techniques are going to help improve Levi's fluency at a second grade level!

I am looking forward to working with Levi on his fluency and am looking forward to seeing him excel even more in reading!  If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask me, my door is always open!  I am so proud of your son and his accomplishments in my classroom!

Thank you!
Leanne Zotos

Plans for small reading lessons

When I told my teacher about my small reading lessons, she wanted me to focus on students who were excelling as opposed to students who were struggling.  She told me that this group of 4 students are really at a second grade reading level (after testing) and don't really get much practice reading at that level because the rest of the class cannot read that high.  She asked me to do a reading group with 2 students to work on reading fluency with a second grade level book and another group of 2 focusing on comprehension of a second grade level book.

My mentor teacher took me to the school's book room which is a huge (and awesome) room full of books separated by reading level (second grade is a reading level 2) and told me to just pick out 2 sets of books that I wanted to work on with my students.  I decided on a book called Rosie's House for fluency and The Big, Bad Cook for comprehension.  Both of the stories seemed really cute and looked like they would be entertaining for my Kindergartners so that is why I picked them.

For my comprehension lesson I plan on having my 2 students read the book alternating pages.  I will have them read the story that way and then after they are done reading we are going to talk about the beginning, middle, and end of the story and discuss the different aspects of those three parts.  I might ask them some questions about the details of what happened during those different points in the story.  

For my fluency lesson I am going to model reading to my students two different ways, the first way I will read the story normally focusing on punctuations marks and emotion in my voice then I will read the same page in a robot monotone voice.  I will ask my students which one they liked listening to best and what was the difference between them.  I will talk to them about how we need to focus on punctuation marks and how we use our voices in different ways, how we have to read not too fast and not too slow.  Then I will have my students alternate reading the book together, practicing their fluency while they are reading.  As we are going, I will make corrections if my students need it while reading.  After we will talk about how they read!  

Reflection on Putman and Kingsley

In reading Putman and Kingsley's work, I was easily able to connect what I was reading to the new literacies project we did.  The article was focused on how the current generation of students are learning in the classroom and how they are benefitting from 21st century technology.  The article started off by explaining a fun way to engage students in learning about science through song.  It gave an example and a way in which is impresionable on students.  The article then went on to talk about podcasts and how they are helping develop students' vocabulary.  When I first read this I thought it was strange to connect students' vocabulary competence to listening to podcasts.  It was shown that by researching students who listened to podcasts, there was a correlation to their understanding of more science vocabulary.  Students reported that listening to the podcasts motivated them to find out more about the vocabulary words being stated.  Listening to podcasts is a way for students to interact with what they are listening to by being able to control what they are listening to.  For instance, if a student is struggling to understand a certain concept, they can rewind the podcast and go back and listen to a certain portion over and over again.  Hearing these things more than once will aid students in comprehending the material.  Students today are very drawn to learning in interactive ways because this is accesible to them in and outside of the classroom in most cases.  Even though podcasts may not be as exciting as interactive online games, they still allow for students to take control in their learning.  It is important in this day in age to keep students engaged in what they are learning, so in order to do so we need to make learning fun to the best of our ability as teachers.  I originally thought that by introducing students to certain technologies, such as podcasts or games would hinder their learning, but studies show otherwise.  It is nice to see that students are able to learn while also doing something that they enjoy.  The students are getting the best of both worlds.

Understanding Literacy

When I first heard we would be doing this project, I was not sure what "new literacies" were.  I knew what literacies were, but I did not know how many different types of new literacies were present and how important each of them are in the development of literacy. Students today are surrounded by technology inside and outside of the classroom.  Depending on the resources students have available to them, most spend a considerable amount of time a week around technology.  Some of these exposures to technologies can be negative, but it is important for teachers to make sure that exposures to technology are done in a constructive manner which allows them to learn to the best of their ability.

There are positive atributes of using technology in the classroom.  Allowing students to explore and interact in their own way promotes their creativity.  When students are engaging in a way that they enjoy, they will be able to learn the material better and stay interested in what they are learning.  My group initially wanted to do MuseumBox for our New Literacies project.  Unfortunately the website was changed to only cater to members.  We then decided to create a Popplet for cultural literacy.  The popplet enabled us to make cultural literacy more exciting and interactive.  When beginning to explore the popplet, it looks like a web and it connects ideas.  We included bullet points, videos, and pictures to make the presentation more attention grabbing.  Our goal was to make it look very user friendly and to make it very easy to navigate around the web and learn about new material.

If technology is present in the classroom and is not engaging and does not target the correct learning goal, it can be useless.  With the current generation, it is important that we are able to best support students in learning how to use technology efficiently.  It is also important to encourage the use of technology in bettering one's skills.  There are many different technologies present that can engage students' minds better than something written on the board or lectured to them, may be able to do.  Technologies can empower young minds in the best way to better their learning.  

NLP Final Post

When looking back at the definition of literacy I posted on February 11^th, I can clearly see how Cultural Literacy fits in.  A part of my first definition stated, “Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups.  As society and technology change, so does literacy”.  I remember when I first found that definition how much I liked the second sentence.  And after exploring my classmate’s projects and learning about Cultural Literacy myself, I have come to love the definition even more.  I truly believe that literacy changes with time, and it is our job as future educators, to keep up with it! Like I stated previously, I did not know a tool like Popplet existed before searching for technologies to use for this project.  If I wanted my students to create a concept map or web, I would have asked them to stay seated at their desks, pull out a piece of paper and pencil, and create a web by hand.  Now, I have found a resource to accomplish the same goals, but in a much more engaging and I believe, effective way.  Since times are changing, it is very important that we change as well in order to teach our students in a way that they can relate to, have fun with, and learn a lot from. 

From this project, I have not only learned more about different technologies, but a lot about different literacies as well.  When we first started talking about the project, I was wondering what a “new literacy” meant.  I had a preconceived definition of literacy in my head, and did not think it could be much more than reading and writing.  However, I have learned so much.  I had no idea how many different kinds of literacies there are, and how important they all are to bring into the classroom.  From exploring Cultural Literacy deeply, I have learned how important it is to be culturally literate and how to incorporate cultural literacy into my classroom.

To provide “effective literacy instruction” means to give your students many choices.  As teachers, we need to give our students opportunities to learn in numerous ways, some in which we may be unfamiliar with.  Our students are growing up in the age of technology, where they are constantly surrounded with educational TV shows, interactive websites, hands-on items such as iPads and iPods, social media websites and YouTube.  Because our students spend a great deal of time with these technologies outside of the class, I do not see why we should not bring them into the classroom.  Also, every student is different, and therefore a different learner.  I can speak from a personal example that technology is a very effective way to learn.  My brother has always been a very tech-savvy person, if you have any questions about anything concerning any technology, he will have the answer.  He struggled in elementary school because he was not given the opportunity to be hands on, or engaged in a way that suited his learning style.  In order to meet the needs of diverse learners, technological learners cannot be forgotten. 

As a teacher, you will constantly be learning, and I think it is important to remember that students can be teachers too.  Since technology is constantly changing, teachers need to be open-minded and not glued to traditional pen and paper activities.  Using Popplet for this project has made me realize how easy it is to incorporate technology into an assignment, and it made me excited to search for more tools that I can use in the future.  It is our responsibility to provide our students with different choices, such as different technologies and literacies.  Students need to not only know about what is available to them on the web, but how to use these resources effectively.  Teachers need to show students how to use the technology they want their students to use, before just telling students to “create a website” or “post on a blog”.  Although many students may be familiar with different technologies, some may not be, which is another reason to give them the chance in that classroom!  I am excited to take what I have learned from both new literacies and technologies and use that information in my future classroom.

New Literacies Project

The technology my group first decided to use was Museum Box.  However, after realizing that Museum Box has newly become a tool that you have to pay for, we chose to make our New Literacies project on Popplet.  

Popplet is a great source for visual learners.  Popplet allows you to create an interactive graphic organizer, by adding text, pictures, and links in different bubbles or "popplets".  I really like that is it appealing to the eye in the fact that you can view the Popplet as a whole, or chose to zoom in if you desire.  Popplet is very user-friendly, and easy to navigate.  Popplet looks very clean, and simple to the eye, which is good for students or teachers that become overwhelmed when there are many different things going on on a single website.  Popplet is also very organized in the fact that you can color-code each bubble as you build your web.

Before exploring Popplet, the only graphic organizers I knew of were webs or concept maps drawn on paper, so I was excited when my group found this resource.  I think it is very important for teachers to implement technology into the classroom, and I think that Popplet is something easy that teachers can start with. 

The new literacy my group has chose is Cultural Literacy.  I am learning that cultural literacy is a very broad concept and that it encompasses many topics.  My group has learned that J.D. Hirsch is the man who coined the term “cultural literacy” and has written a book that is quoted by many when explain the definition of cultural literacy.  My group will be providing the definition of cultural literacy, J.D. Hirsch’s book, videos, books, and quizzes to test if you are culturally literate or not on our Popplet!