Update on New Literacies Project

Amanda and I met today and hammered out a few ideas for our project. We are going to be exploring the Jewish culture and what comes with it. We are going to talk about terms and ideas that most people that are not Jewish aren't familiar with, in hopes that they will become familiar with the heritage and culture. We are talking about anything from common Jewish terminology, to the importance of food being kosher.
This project is teaching me a lot in the aspect that everything that happens in the world has its own language, and people that are not familiar with the language being spoken, are going to feel like outsiders. I know I talk a lot about baseball, and someone who is not familiar with the sport may feel bad if I was using baseball terminology in a conversation. Amanda is very familiar with the Jewish culture, and I am somewhat familiar with it, and I see how important it is to become literate in as many different things as possible because it makes the person and student more well rounded and more likely to succeed in every day life.

Balanced Literacy Instruction

Balanced literacy instruction is a "decision-making approach through which teachers make thoughtful and purposeful decisions about how to help students become better readers and writers." (Tompkins, p. 24) A balanced approach is not easy and it requires much effort and planning from the teacher, but it can prove to be very effective and has the potential to work for a high percentage of students. Since a balanced approach is so comprehensive it takes into account all different types of learners which in turn allows students to hopefully find something that works for them. The focus of this approach is equally on reading, phonics, strategies, vocabulary, comprehension, literature, content-area study, oral language, writing, and spelling. I have seen examples of most all of these in my field time. However, I don't spend enough time in class and do not know the curriculum well enough to state whether my CT uses a completely balanced literacy program.

When I have my own classroom I am going to make a concerted effort to have a balanced approach to literacy instruction. This is my goal regardless of the grade level or ability of student that I will be teaching. I think that a balanced approach will give the students the best opportunity for success in their reading and writing. It is easy for me to write all of this now, I only hope that when I do have my own classroom that I am willing and able to put together a literacy program that has students working on a wide variety of skills needed to truly be literate.

Potential Vocab Lesson

I would use a book like Roll of Thunder in my classroom if I were teaching in middle school. I think this is a good book to use in literature circles, but there are ways to go above and beyond the circles an incorporate different parts of the curriculum with it. I think at this age level it is important for the students to start recognizing different vocabulary that they aren't used to. Very similarly to Mike [H], I was thinking of a vocabulary activity that had the students find words with which they are unfamiliar. I think that within their literacy groups, they should go through and discuss the words that they didn't know. The recorder that session will write them down and they will go to a computer and look up all of the words. At the end of the class, we will compile an entire list of all the words. This will become the vocabulary list for the week, and will continue this way until the book is finished. The students will be able to learn vocabulary for the novel as well as enrich themselves and others.

Potential Vacabulary Lesson Plan

My potential vocabulary lesson for the book Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor, would be for a 5th or 6th grade class. The goal of the lesson is for each student to learn new words and in the process enhance their vocabulary. Going into the lesson I would expect that each student is able to read the book and to find vocabulary that they need help with learning. If a student is unable to read the book I would look to make necessary adjustments to the lesson for that student. For each assignment within the lesson the students will read two chapters paying attention to not only the story, but also the vocabulary that the author uses. To ensure that the students are doing this, they will have to come to school with two or three words in the writing that they didn’t know and had to look up in the dictionary to find the meaning. Also, the students will have to bring to class two or three words that they didn’t initially know while reading but were able to figure out the word’s definition based on its use in the contest of the story. As a class, students will share the words with each other and we will make a master list of the vocabulary words. This will enable the students to teach each other and work together, hopefully learning new words in the process.

My vocab lesson

For my vocabulary lesson with the kids, I am going to continue working on sight words with my students.

I am going to get the next group of sight words from my CT that we will be using in the class and I will go over the words with my students.

I will then have the students practice reading and writing these words. I will have them write each word three times so they can practice spelling it and seeing it, and I will put the words on big note cards and mix them up and have the students practice going through all of the words until they get them down. The students will also be able to practice the words when I am not in the classroom when the teacher feels it appropriate to practice them.

Comprehension Strategy Instruction for Primary Grades

For reading comprehension I read the article by Katherine Stahl, "Proof, practice, and promise: Comprehension strategy instruction in the primary grades." I decided to read this article because of my kindergarten placement and thought that I could possibly find connections between the article and my field time.

There was a time when reading fluency was the only emphasis of the early grades. Recent research has indicated that although fluency is important, so too is comprehension. Students need to start learning comprehension strategies as soon as possible because the strategies allow students to read and understand text that they have no previous knowledge of. Stahl writes that comprehension strategies "have the potential to provide access that is removed from personal experience." (p. 598)

According to research and usage, Stahl breaks comprehension strategies into four categories. The first two categories are well researched strategies that are either widely used or in limited use by teachers. The second two categories are strategies that haven't been researched, and are either widely used or in limited use by teachers. The strategies are all connected in that they can be used in some way in the early elementary grades to promote and work on reading comprehension. All of the strategies have the potential to help students, but some are better researched and proven to work. Regardless of which strategy a teacher uses, the point is that the teacher is trying to teach the students how to comprehend and understand the text that they are reading. Learning reading comprehension will greatly benefit the students as they move on to higher levels in their education.

It was interesting to read through the different strategies and think about what I have seen in my kindergarten class. When my CT reads to the students she will guide a discussion where she asks the kids to make predictions, she relates the story to her own life, she asks plot related questions, and she asks many other types of questions related to the story. My CT is in complete control of the discussion and is guiding the students in their comprehension of the story. This is understandable because it would be too much to expect that the kindergarten students could lead a productive discussion of the book. Teacher driven discussion and questions are widely used and researched strategies for teaching reading comprehension. Stahl supports these types of strategies, saying that, "teacher-led questioning can be a powerful vehicle in moving text interactions toward higher levels of thinking and critical literacy." (p. 601)

One strategy that I have never seen used before, but that I think could work well, is literature webbing. To do literature webbing, the teacher writes the events of the story on cards, mixes them up, and then gives them to the students to put in order. After the students predict how the story will unfold, the teacher reads the story to the class. After the reading, the class returns to their original prediction and makes corrections as they talk about what happened in the story. This strategy could be used in first grade, and I believe that with the right book, it could work in kindergarten too. This comprehension strategy isn't widely used, but research does validate its effectiveness. Reutzel and Fawson studied literature webbing and came to the conclusion in a 1991 study that, "first-grade readers using the webbing procedure read the text with higher percentages of accuracy and were also more successful in answering specific questions about the text than a control group." (p. 603)

New Literacies Project

For my new literacy project I am going to be creating comic strips that deal with sports literacy. This wasn't one of the options as far as what type of literacy we could explore, but I feel that there is a language and literacy that is unique to the world of sports. For me, this project is based on the definition of literacy as "knowledge of a particular subject or field." In my case that knowledge and field is going to be various sports. Specifically, I am going to create separate comic strips for about five or six different sports and the language that is unique to each of those sports. This will be done as if students in an elementary class were making the comics to inform their classmates of the language and literacy that is unique to the particular sport that they are interested in. I have always been a fan of comic strips and I think that this is something that students in elementary school would enjoy working with. I have only just now begun working with the software for creating the comic strips and I think that it enables one to express information and ideas in a very unique way. I am looking forward to getting more involved in the project and hopefully I don't run into too many problems as I work with the new technology of the comic strip creator

New Literacies Project

For my new literacies project, Amanada Z and I are going to be doing a powerpoint presentation followed by a wordle on Cultural Literacy. The culture that we are going to be focusing on is the Jewish Culture. Amanda was born and raised Jewish, and even though I was born and rasied Catholic, my father is Jewish, so this culture has been present in my up bringing. I am really excited to work on and complete this project because it will be allowing me to use different types of technology that I have never used before, and I will be learning a lot about my own culture.
Wordle is a program that I have never used before, but I have seen it used in one of my classes and I thought it was an amazing program. It allows the user to see which words are used to the most, and can give other readers of the wordle a general idea of what is being talked about the most in a presentation.

New Literacies Project

I have decided to create a classroom blog to keep students and parents updated on things that happen each day in class. The blog will be a compilation of videos uploaded onto Teacher Tube of the different centers or ideas that we are covering in class. It will also be infused with the students’ own work. They will be creating podcasts and videos to share with their families and classmates about what they have been doing in class. The blog will serve as a resource for parents and for the students who have been missing from school. They can look back at the blog to make sure they have everything on task, or parents can use the videos to help their students focus on different things at home. Since parents will be able to access computers and internet at the library, this is something that would be useful for everyone—even those who don’t have a computer directly available at home.

I have already posted my first entry and will keep it updated as I obtain new ideas. Here is the link to my project so you can see it if you'd like:

http://newlitproject09.blogspot.com

Book Club

Book club has been a learning experience for me. This is new to me and I don't remember ever doing anything like book club way back when I was in grade school. We did more of the traditional book reports where we would read the book at home and then write a paper answering predetermined questions according to the teacher's specifications. I remember hating these book reports and not getting too much out of the whole process. Book club has the potential to be much more meaningful and beneficial to students than the book reports that I had to do. What I like most about book club is the versatility of the project for both the teacher and the students. Teachers can adjust the project by changing who is in what group or by having the students focus on a certain theme for a given week. The students can adjust the project by choosing from a number of different activities to express their thoughts and ideas each week. This is great because it puts the learning in the hands of the students and forces them to take a more active role in trying to comprehend what they are reading as they teach themselves about the book. Also, this choice is good for the students because it allows the students to pick an activity that they are passionate about, such as drawing about the book or connecting it to one's own life. This would have been good for me when I was in elementary school because I wouldn't have felt constricted and bored with the traditional book report. When I have my own classroom someday I will use book club over book reports because I feel that the most powerful learning for students happens when they have some control over how this learning takes place.

Book Club

I'm not sure if this is what I'm supposed to blog about this week, but it is on the syllabus so I am going to write about it! I am thoroughly intrigued by the idea of book club that we're using in our class. I think that the ideas on page 93-95 of our coursepack are really helpful things that we will be able to use in our classrooms eventually [some people may be able to use them for their lessons]. I think that allowing the students to pick and choose which activity they will do is an interesting approach. It allows them to choose something they enjoy to express the way they felt about something in the book, making it authentic to them. I do think, though, that it would be wise to group the students based on which activities they chose for that week, not to keep them in the same groups. I feel like this would be more effective, because they will be able to see many different perspectives from the book and not have to repeat one of the "book club" elements from the previous weeks/class periods.
Book clubs are able to facilitate comprehension in that they help students understand different aspects of the book based on the different portions that they hear from their classmates. Everyone will be giving a different perspective of the book, basically everyone did their own special "reading" of the book.

Now, I understand that book clubs are more geared toward older students, so I am having a hard time thinking about even using this idea with a kindergarten class. I am wondering what the two of you think about this, and if you would try to implement something like this with such young students/emergent readers. If you would, how would you do so?