Blog #5- Reading Fluency

           There are many approaches that are effective in assessing the three components of fluency, which are accuracy, reading speed, and prosody.  In assessing fluency, I think testing high frequency words is very important.  There are many ways to assess students’ awareness of high frequency words. Giving students a list of words to read off as efficiently as possible is an important assessment to use within in the classroom, because often, high-frequency words are known as sight words.  This means that students will see these words often in different activities they do throughout their lives.  “Through repeated reading and writing experiences, students develop automaticity, the ability to quickly to quickly recognize words they read…” (Tompkins, pg. 189)  This is a great description explained by Tompkins in the text when talking about high frequency words.

            Another effective approach for assessing fluency would be improving reader’s reading speed.  If students are able to read the same excerpt or reading selection multiple times through at a fast pace, then they may be able to recognize words used in other texts.  Tompkins also mentions the ability to chunk sentences into meaningful units, guided reading, and choral reading as a few ways to help students with reading fluency.  There are many ways to enhance students’ reading fluency.  As teachers, we need to be aware of these many methods, so we can try and improve each and every student’s fluency.

            In my field placement, I have noticed my teacher uses a high frequency word assessment.  She has the students read to her a list of high frequency words, and either checks if the students know the word in a quick fashion or a slash if the students had to sound out the word/did not read the word right away/skips the word.  My teacher said this assessment gives her an idea of who happens to be on track with the curriculum and who may need more reading instruction.  From the beginning of the year until now, I have seen a big change in my student’s ability to recognize high frequency words.  In order to scaffold students to get to this certain point, my teacher has used different techniques in the classroom.  Many of the techniques come from scripted units called Reading Street.  My teacher reads from a script and creates lessons based on what the book calls for.  Some of the activities included in the book are guided reading, read out loud, spelling tests, etc.  Some of these activities seem to be working to get students to recognize a variety of words in text.

            A mini-lesson that could be used to teach fluency regarding The Bread Winner would be having the students create their own glossary of words that are not normally read in everyday reading.  Students will have sustained silent reading for approximately 20-30 minutes, and will compile a list of words they do not understand.  Students will include the page number from the word they did not understand and the passage the word was found from.  The teacher will bring the students back together and talk about what words they had trouble decoding and reading in context.  Words, such as: militia, burqas, chador, and looters, could be words students found in the first two chapters to discuss further.  Students would write the word down and what they think the word might mean.  They will use contextual clues in order to try and find out a definition.  As students read off the words they had trouble reading and understanding, the teacher will have them read the passage included with the word.  Students will have a discussion related to what the word might mean, then will research the words and find out the actual definitions.  The teacher will post the definitions in the classroom somewhere, so while students are reading the rest of the book, they will be able to continually be as fluent as possible.  This type of mini-lesson can happen throughout the entire book to make sure students understand what they are reading!

^^ This would be a good place for children to do their reading, so they can be as comfy as possible :)  

Blog #4- New Literacies Noteblog

Part One: CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING

            Creating this new literacy project revolving around emotional literacy has showed me that there are different ways people can be literate in our society.  Prior to conducting this project, I had no idea there were different literacies involving a variety of topics.  I thought the only to way to become literate was to read and write.  After looking at everyone’s literacy projects, I was able to get an understanding of what each literacy was about.  Everyone had very creative methods for presenting their information and material, which allowed me to gather information about a variety of digital literacies as well.  I learned a great deal from this project, and I think exploring ALL of the literacies would give me interesting topics to cover when I become a teacher.  After creating my web site using Weebly, I feel I was able to divide my work up into sections and topics that would divide my research in a great way.  Creating subtopics/web pages allows the reader to know exactly what they are going to read about.  Users can pick an outlet and know exactly what they are going to read.  This made researching a lot easier to do and complete.

            From the very beginning of the semester, I did not include digital literacy into my literacy map.  Nor did I include emotional, social, cultural, social, etc.  These are VERY important literacies that I think I overlooked as a student/future teacher.  I feel that I will use technology the best way I can possible in order to convey meaningful lessons to my students.  Technology can give students new ways to display ideas or materials they have learned, which is so fantastic.  Letting children be creative is so important and can create such an interesting classroom.

 Part Two: EFFECTIVE LITERACY INSTRUCTION

            To provide “effective literacy instruction” to diverse students is allowing students to explore the world of literature in a variety of ways.  There are so many different ideas and thoughts that make up each individual student, and as a future teacher; I need to be aware of these differences.  Giving students more options to learn and grow as literacy learners is something teachers cannot take for granted.  Creating a website about emotional literacy let me research the topic through many different websites.  I was able to narrow my search focus and really find out many details about emotional literacy.  As I stated earlier, I was able to come up with certain subtopics I wanted to discuss in relation to emotional literacy.

            I think elementary school students would have had a great time using a web site tool as their digital literacy to explore other types of literacies, such as emotional literacy.  Students would be able to research on emotional literacy and create a website using the information they found.  Students could also learn a great deal from each other while learning through tools regarding technology.  I know that I learned a great amount from my classmates, and I feel that my students would be able to come to the same conclusion as me.  However, I believe students would need to learn how to manipulate the website tool they would like to use.  The teacher would have to model for the students multiple times in order for students to fully understand the tools.  Students would need to understand certain design and editing tools that create a web site and also how to conduct research on the Internet.  Being able to effectively browse the Internet is a task many students would need modeling before completing on their own.  Students need to know what a good research source looks like, and I think the teacher could do a lot of modeling to show students what is and is not appropriate.

           
Part Three: LESSON PLAN

            In creating a lesson plan using a website to demonstrate knowledge learned from emotional literacy, I think if the whole class participated as an entire class, then there could be a lot of learning from each other happening.  This lesson would take place after many lessons involving emotional literacy.  We would have covered what emotional literacy was and different knowledge learned from the students.

    Target Area/Rationale:  Students need to be aware of the usage of technology in literature in order to discover new information regarding new literacies.  There is a great amount of information on the Internet that can be useful to students as they learn about emotional literacy.  Specifically speaking, researching about emotional literacy and creating a website about findings is a great opportunity for students to understand a new literacy they may no understand.

    Objectives:  My objectives would be to have my students create a website about emotional literacy after many classes of scaffolding the students on how to edit a web page.  Students will work together in groups to create certain pages of the website.  This way, students are able to work together and engage in the activity together.  Another very important objective that is going to be included on this website is allowing students to post what they learn about emotional literacy whenever possible.  This allows students to not only learn about emotional literacy, but will scaffold their learning of the digital literacy as well.

    Materials/Supplies:  Computers, examples of what emotional literacy might look like in the classroom (picture books)

    Key Events:

o   To start off the lesson, teacher will pass out examples of emotional literature.   These examples will be picture books about some type of emotional situation.

o   The teacher will ask students to summarize the book and write a little summary about the key events.

o   After, students will get in groups and talk about what happened in their book and what their books are about.

o   After about 10 minutes, the teacher will step in and ask students to share what they learned from their books.

o   After sharing time, the teacher will introduce to the class that they will be making a web site to show all of the information learned from their picture books.

o   Students will have turns brainstorming what goes on the site and how it should look.

o   This may take a few lessons, but I think this will effectively show students how to make a website about a new literacy while working as a classroom community.

o   There will be a webpage for “student findings”, which will allow students to add new knowledge about emotional literacy whenever they think of it or get a chance to type it up.

    Closing Summary:  Emotional literacy is an important literacy that can affect show students behave in the classroom.  I feel emotional literacy is looked over a great amount, and doing a lesson like the one stated above can give students an opportunity to learn about two literacies at one.  Students need to have technology as a part of their learning world; it’s very important and can help students learn new ideas in a different format.

    Ongoing Assessment:  The website will allow me to keep checking in on what students are adding about emotional literacy.  Whenever a student learns something new about emotional literacy, they are to put that information on the website.  This allows me to see my students growth from the beginning of the project until the end of the year.

Blog #3- New Literacies Project

            My new literacy project is creating a website using Weebly about emotional literacy with Cristyn.  As I began working with my partner on our Weebly website, I discover that we needed to go through many different layouts and designs before we could move on to the actual content.  Finding a layout to fit the topics we wanted to cover took some time, but we were able to find a format where the information was easily accessible.  As soon as we found a fitting lay out, we needed to do research and find out exactly what we wanted to talk about in our website.  We went and read in-depth the various readings given to us on the wiki about emotional literacy.  We found a great amount of information that would aid us in to finding the definitions of literacy and emotional literacy.  When dealing with emotional literacy, I found many definitions that had many components. 

            From what I read on many websites, I found that in the simplest terms possible, emotional literacy is being able to recognize, monitor, and express one’s emotions while being able to empathize with other’s emotions.  As I began reading deeper, I kept thinking of different issues I could talk about in the website.  Questions kept popping in my head through the various readings, such as:

            

            How do children deal with literature that is emotional?

            When do children get exposed to emotional literacy?

            As teachers, what should we include in the classroom to get students to understand the concept of emotional literacy?

           

            We decided to split these types of questions into more general subjects, so we could include as much information about each topic as possible.  Our subjects (tabs) that we have included on our website are the definitions and different aspects of emotional literacy and literacy, how emotional literacy can be used in the classroom, the importance of emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, resources, and a pop quiz for people who have read our web site and want to test what they know about emotional literacy.  We briefly began looking for material for each topic and discovered that we were going to need to be really detailed in each section on our website.  In order to do so, we have planned to use scholarly articles, YouTube videos, websites, and other sources in order to be as successful as we possibly can be on this website.

            Thus far, reading and writing have been our main sources of ways we have explored this kind of new technology.  Figuring out what types of information and topics to include on our web site is going to be a challenge, because we do not want people to get lost in the information nor do we want people not to have enough to read about.  Watching movies for information has been a new skill that I have not really used and appreciated in the past.  While watching videos online, I noticed that I have been paying more attention to exactly what the speaker may be saying in order to be as accurate as possible with this project as possible.  I really enjoy discovering a new technology and being able to research a new topic.  While learning about both of these different topics, I thought including this kind of activity in the classroom would be very beneficial to students.   If we worked on a web site as a class, I think students would be able to learn how to use an online tool, while also discover methods for researching a certain topic.  Both of these topics are very important to the growth of students and each student could benefit to a great extent through this type of activity.