The Power of Choice

           Within the chapter “Conditions for Effective Writing,” the author outlined how important writing is to students’ educational growth and how to go about setting up the best conditions for quality writing to happen. One of the points that I agreed with the most was adding the opportunity for choice. It is so important to allow students to choose their own topics to write about because it combats the trend of assigning topics to students and getting poor writing in return.  When students have to opportunity to choose, they tend to be more motivated to explore the topic, try harder to get their point across, and produce honest pieces of writing. I know from experience how this affects students. In my high school language class, we were given specific topics to write about throughout the semester. I usually enjoy writing, but I did not enjoy this class at all. I felt like I was constantly writing about issues that had no relevance to my life and it caused me to not try as hard. However, at the end of the year we were given the opportunity to choose our own topic for a research paper. I remember thinking how amazing this was and ultimately getting an A on the paper. This shows first hand how essential it is for teachers to allow students to explore their own topics of interest. This way, they will have a better chance of creating quality pieces of writing.

Every Mark on the Page

Within the article “Every Mark on the Page,” the author describes a variety of points that teachers should cover when educating family and community members on what young children’s writing should look like for their age level. These are very important tactics to learn because, often times, adults get too worked up and worried about how their children are doing in school when they really should not be. On top of this, they sometimes try to put matters into their own hands by overly correcting the child, therefore causing more harm than good. If a particular adult constantly corrects spelling errors, bans their child from using inventive spelling, and makes them copy all of their work without mistakes, they can discourage the child from actually enjoying to write. It ends up taking all of the fun right out to writing for them.

One of the main tactics that the author describes to teachers is that they should show family and community members what early writing looks like. This entails the teacher to display to the adults an anonymous piece of writing that they can then use to make points about writing at that level. The teacher is able to take the writing and go through why the students did what they did and, also, explain why the mistakes are acceptable. This is done as a way to calm the adults down and to make them realize that making mistakes is an alright thing to do for their child’s age. Without mistakes, the children are unable to learn and grow.

The latter half of the article explains how to go about empowering family and community members to support their young writers. The first example given is the open house method. With this, the teachers try to meet with the adults, show them sample pieces of writing, and give them examples of spelling resources. Another way to encourage family and community members is by incorporating important points for them to follow within a weekly newsletter. This way, the adults are reminded often what is the best way to go about encouraging their children’s writing. Lastly, teachers can also hold a writing workshop for family and community members. With this, they can get a more in depth explanation of the practices that they should be following with their child at home.  

Overall, I completely agree with the authors points. I strongly believe that family members can often stunt their child’s educational growth and discourage them from wanting to write in the future. Much like teachers, they need to be made educated of these issues and how to avoid them from happening with their young children. Every child should feel excited and confident about their writing, whether they make errors or not.

Phonemic Awareness

 While reading the article entitled “Teaching Phonemic Awareness,” I was able to learn some very valuable information about helping students in my future classroom. Before the article, I had no idea that students could learn phonemic skills through daily play with themselves and others. By giving me examples of how to facilitate these phonemic awareness activities, I now feel much more prepared to tackle these issues within my own future classroom.

One of the activities that really interested me within the article was the Hinky Pinky game. I had never heard of this before, but quickly became a fan of it. With this activity, students are able to practice sounds and word awareness in an engaging and fun way. In order to play, students come up with a rhyming word pair answer (duck truck, soggy doggy, etc). They then think of a riddle that describes the two words they just came up with. For example, if the children came up with the answer funny bunny, the riddle could be what would you call something that tells jokes while hoping around? The article stated that students really enjoy this activity and that it is a great way to develop sound awareness within the classroom.

Another way that they article described as helping nurture phonemic awareness was called inventive spelling. This is when students attempt to spell words using only their prior knowledge of the English language. By doing this, they often spell words wrong.  However, they are still getting much needed practice with spelling and language sounds. Eventually, with this, they will start to spell the words conventionally and without help. It has been shown that students who participate in inventive spelling when learning how to write often become fluent writers when they move onto higher grades.

Both the Hinky Pinky activity and inventive spelling are ways in which teachers can help nurture phonemic awareness that students should develop just by simply playing with words. If students seem to struggle with phonemic awareness after a certain age, however, their teachers should give them more specific instruction. This could include sound matching, sound isolation, sound blending, sound substitution and sound segmentation. All of which provide the student with the support needed to succeed.

Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting Podcast

The podcast that I listened to was called Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting. Within it, three women by the names of Pat Johnson, Diane Deford, and Mary Cappellini outlined important points on how to make decisions for students within a small group setting.

The first speaker, Pat Johnson, focused her discussion on the three queing systems, which include meaning, visual, and syntactic. More specifically, meaning is if the sentence makes sense, visual is if the word looks right, and syntactic is if the word sounds right. She also discussed how it is important for young readers to develop a balance of all three of these strategies, which I did not realize until she explained it further. By listening to the podcast, I was able to learn that all of these strategies are interconnected. This means that there must be a balance between all three in order to become an efficient reader. For example, if a student is only focusing on visual details, they may only try to sound words out by their letters. This, although it may work for some words, is certainly not always helpful. There are plenty of words that are impossible to sound out, just because of how the English language is.  Similarly, if a student only relies on meaning, they can also face many difficulties. They may change words in the sentence to ones that go along with the picture, but are not correct. In order to solve this, students must learn all three cueing systems and use them at the same time.

The second speaker, Diane Deford, focused her presentation on how important it is to really know the readers in the small groups you are creating. One of the main points that I learned from her is that students bring many differences to the table that teachers should be aware of before they start their small group readings. For one, students all have different interests. This is important to know when picking out what books to read with the group. If the teacher picks out a book on a topic that no one likes, they will be less motivated to try to read it. Diane also said that it is important for teachers to know their students experiential base. This is important to know because it will be easier to form group discussions and questions if they are aware of the student’s histories. Lastly, she stated that it is important to find out what strategies the students within the group can already do. This way they can focus on gaining more strategies and not just review ones they have already mastered.

The last lady to speak was Mary Cappellini, whose major focus is on English Language Learners. The main idea I learned from her is that it is very important to allow time for students to practice their skills. This time should be given for individual practice and for group activities. For ELL students especially, they need time to both read independently and talk as a group. This way, they can work on gaining the strategies needed for reading and then apply their language skills in a group discussion afterwards. Reading and language skills really go hand in hand, and students can develop both their cognition and their language simultaneously.

Back to School Armstrong Panel

An Armstrong panel is composed of selected educators from Indiana who have shown excellence in their jobs and are strongly committed to the career of teaching. These educators come to the Indiana University-Bloomington campus and hold a panel discussion in front of anyone who would like to attend. There is usually a topic that is chosen to be the main concentration of the presentation and questions are allowed at the end. For the Armstrong panel that I attended, the main focus was on preparing for coming back to school and how to successfully complete the first couple weeks with a new class.  Most of the educators outlined what they do in preparation for the school year and how they set up their individual classrooms.

One teacher that I learned a lot from came from an inner city school and felt very strongly about using time and resources wisely. The main idea I took away from his presentation is that everything on the walls of your classroom should be for a purpose. This means that all of the posters that are hung up are for a specific reason, such as teaching a new skill or reminding students of how to do a certain task. There are no silly posters that do not mean anything because all of the wall space is used for educational purposes. I completely agree with this idea because it speaks to what the children are in school for. They are there to learn as much as the can, not to sit in a pretty classroom. 

Another educator who I learned a lot from was a woman who teaches fifth grade at Binford Elementary School. One of the main points of her presentation was to urge future educators to be flexible. She explained that there will always have to be changes in your curriculum, simply because not every class will be the same from year to year. Sometimes teachers have to change their plans because of time or to fit the needs of students. Change is okay! As an educator, you must adapt to your surroundings and find a way to rework your lessons. Being flexible is an absolute must. 

Overall, I really enjoyed listening to this particular Armstrong panel. The educators who talked obviously had a lot of teaching experience and provided many great ideas throughout the presentation. It is truly nice to hear from teachers who have been through years of the profession and still thoroughly enjoy it. This gives me hope for my future career.

Guided Reading: Reading With Children

Within Chapter 5 of Catching Readers Before They Fall, the authors discussed the many components that make up a comprehensive literacy framework within a classroom. These components included read-alouds, shared readings, guided readings, independent readings, morning messages, community writings, and independent writings, each of which are divided into two major categories. The first is reading to, with and by children, while the other is writing to, with and by children.  The chapter goes onto state that is important that both of these areas are addressed within the classroom because they work together to help students develop effective reading process systems. According to Marie Clay, “Writing can foster reading competence and vice versa if the learner becomes aware of the reciprocal nature of these acts. Reading and writing can be learned concurrently and interrelatedly” (1998, 138). This means that students can practice and use both reading and writing activities simultaneously to help them better comprehend how texts work.

           

While reading the chapter, one component of the comprehensive literacy framework stood out to me as something I had just seen in my current field experience. More specifically, last Thursday, I witnessed a small group of forth grade students participate in a guided reading practice with their teacher. In order to do this, the teacher called on six of her students to meet her in the back of the room for a round-robin read aloud. Each student took a turn reading a chapter from a book about the colonial period in American history. The teacher posed questions, answered questions, and had an open dicussion about what was going on in the text while they read together.  Also, just as stated in the book, the teacher played the role of observer by recording any important information that could be used to help the students form their reading processing systems in the future.

I thought it was very interesting that I was able to see one of the ideas outlined in the book done in real life. Even more so, it was cool to tell that techniques such as this really work in the classroom setting. While my field experience teacher worked with the small group, they all seemed very engaged and involved in the reading process. I could see them using their reading strategies to get through the text. I also noticed all of the information that the teacher was getting by both interacting with the students and observing them read. Overall, performing guided reading with the students in the classroom can be very benefical and, ultimately, can help students grow as readers in the long run.

Meaning, Structure and Visual

When students are learning to read, it is essential that they use all the sources of information possible in order to help them figure out what the text is. These sources are explained within the book, Catching Readers Before They Fall, and include meaning, structure and visual cues. Meaning (M), is knowledge that includes background information, context clues, and ideas gathered from pictures. More specifically, this is the strategy a student would use to figure out what the word is by focusing on what makes sense. During my observations in a first grade classroom last semester, I saw this strategy being used on multiple occasions. For example, a little boy in the class tended to focus more on sounding out the letters of words, instead of figuring out what would make sense in the particular book he was reading. When he would get a word wrong, the teacher would ask him to think about what the story was about and figure out the possible words that would actually make sense. He slowly started to use this strategy of meaning as the year went on and began using context clues in order to help him read. Structure (S), on the other hand, is when a student draws upon their knowledge of the spoken language and use that information to figure out what words sound right to them. This can also be checked by having the student read the text out loud and seeing if it makes sense to them in this way. Finally, visual (V) information, which includes the actual letters and words, can be used by students to help them see what word looks right within the text they are trying to read. I also saw this strategy being used within the first grade classroom I was in last semester. Students would often say a word that they thought made sense in the sentence without actually checking to see if it was right. The teacher solved this problem by having the students reread the sentence they just read and look at each word separately. Usually, on the second time around, they would notice the mistake and fix it using their visual strategy. 

Eventually, when students become more skilled at reading, that means that they are using the three cues (meaning, structure, and visual) simultaneously. They are looking for what words makes sense in the sentence, while paying attention to what looks and sounds right to them as well. In order for students to reach this level, the three sources of information should be modeled and practiced by the teacher in front of the class. They can also be touched on in small groups and working with students on an individual level. This way, the students become very familiar with the strategies and are fully aware of how to go about using them in their own reading and writing.

Zone of Proximal Development

While reading about Vygotsky's theory, I began to think about a time in which I had helped a child move a skill from their zone of proximal development to their zone of actual development. Within the reading, it is explained that, often, a teacher must offer explicit modeling and sensitive guidance in order for their students to eventually be able to do some tasks or strategies on their own. During this past summer, I did just that when I took on the difficult task of teaching the little boy, Sam, how to ride a bike. At first, he did not want to try because he was convinced that he was not going to be able to do it. I knew however, that he could learn to do it on his own with some of my help along the way. It took some time, but he eventually he agreed to give it a try. I began the lesson by modeling to him what riding a bike looked like. He had seen others ride bikes before, but I wanted to make sure he had a solid idea in his mind before he tried it himself. After that, he got on the bike and, with my help, started to pedal. I gave him support while riding and allowed him to practice with me for a long time. Eventually, I started to let go of the bike and he was able to do it all by himself. Sam had successfully moved the skill of riding his bike from his zone of proximal development to his zone of actual development, and I was very proud. I could definitely see how the idea of modeling and guidance would be beneficial to do within the classroom setting. Especially with those who are struggling, it is important to let them know that they can do some tasks with a little help from their teacher and then learn to do them on their own later.  Much like what I did with Sam, teachers must be able to locate their students zone of proximal development and offer them guidance in order to help them succeed.