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Final Blog Post

Wow, it seems like yesterday that I was just writing my first blog post for this class! It's hard to believe that this is the last one....can't say I'm sad that summer is almost here, though! ;)

Tomorrow I will be very happy to be able to work one-on-one with my case study student again, whom I will give the pseudonym, "Elizabeth." I have conducted six total assessments with her throughout this semester including an interest inventory, oral retelling, running record, reading attitude survey, sight word inventory, and elementary spelling inventory. For Amy Alexandra Wilson's LLED class we had to conduct these assessments with our case study student and then analyze the results. We turned in miscues analyses after completing each assessment that included a description of that particular assessment, strengths/weaknesses of the student's performance, and an instructional plan for future sessions. After we analyzed all six of these assessments, we were supposed to choose two tutoring sessions to conduct with our student in areas where he/she could benefit from having additional instruction with us one-on-one. I chose to work with Elizabeth on reading and spelling. Based on the running record I completed with her and the miscues I analyzed, I wanted to have a tutoring session with her to focus on splitting words into chunks to help create more word recognition and accuracy when reading. The other session I chose to do with her focuses on spelling. Specifically, for this session we will work on lots of words that use diphthong vowel patterns such as ow, oi, er, ar, or, and ew. Both of my tutoring instructional plans that I made to do with Elizabeth are designed to give her extra instruction and practice in areas where I noticed she was having trouble.

Tomorrow I will complete the first tutoring session with Elizabeth that I created to help increase her word recognition and accuracy when reading. It will use her knowledge of word parts within larger words to decode unfamiliar words, i.e. chunking. Knowing the relationships between letters and sounds will help her to recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and “decode” unfamiliar words. I have a list of twenty 2-syllable words and twenty 3-syllable words that I have written on flashcards. For the 2-syllable words, I am going to show the flashcard to Elizabeth and have her read the first chunk in the word and then the second chunk. After saying both chunks, she will blend them together, say the result, and then try to recognize the word. Elizabeth can examine the chunks for a few seconds and then I will turn over the word and have her write one chunk of the word on each line that I have drawn on a sheet of paper, saying the complete chunk as she writes it. There will be three blanks for her to write in: first chunk, second chunk, full word. This second process that involves writing the words in chunks will help her practice the chunking decoding strategy more and she will improve her ability to accurately recognize words when reading. For the 3-syllable words listed below, Elizabeth will do the exact same process, only with three chunks now instead of just two and the sheet has 4 blanks for her to fill in (first chunk, second chunk, third chunk, full word). I look forward to working with Elizabeth tomorrow and am hoping that the tutoring session goes well and that I am able to successfully help Elizabeth use strategies to decode unfamiliar words! :)

Links to the Blogs I Commented On

http://pvsroom18.blogspot.com/2011/04/diamante-poems.html?showComment=1302125430944#c1002082680621993909


http://kidblog.org/MrsDuffsClass/hailey208/my-new-puppy/#comment-681


http://kidblog.org/MrsDuffsClass/tiffany123/michael-jackson-3-xd/#comment-683

(For the bottom 2 comments that I posted, it says my comment is "awaiting moderation." I'm assuming this means the student will have to accept my comment or something. I hope it shows up for you.)

Oh the joys of observations!

Those of us ECE Block 3 students who are assigned to Whitehead Road Elementary and Oglethorpe Avenue Elementary are supposed to schedule observations via the calendar on elc with a lady named Missy Jersawitz. She is not our EDEC teacher but is somehow connected to our program. I honestly do not even know what her exact position is! haha Anyways, she comes to our 2 schools and observes us, and our actual EDEC teacher, Janna Dresden, observes those of us who are placed at JJ Harris Elementary and Fowler Drive Elementary. As I may have mentioned before, I am at Whitehead Road Elementary again this semester and LOVE it!

Last week in my 2nd grade classroom, I taught a review math lesson on fractions to the students and had scheduled for Missy to come observe me. Of course I was super nervous and was worried my students would behave badly or something in general would go wrong. The observation for scheduled for 10:30 and I was so ready to get it over with! My mentor teacher had already mentioned to the class that a visitor was coming so they should be on their best behavior. I had my fingers crossed that they would!

After recess, it was time for Missy to come and for me to begin the final review lesson in the fraction unit. I actually was somewhat confident because during our full week in the field, I taught the opening fraction review lesson, which was what they should have learned in first grade. My lesson this time began with a card matching game with fraction pictures and words. This opening part of the lesson went really well and I had great control of the class. The next part of the lesson I taught from the Smartboard and I had the students volunteer to come up and solve the problems. This was a good way to engage students, but I did notice that the students that were still in their desks and not answering the problem at the board would get slightly unfocused. Next, I passed out baggies of foam shapes including hexagons, trapezoids, triangles, and rhombuses. The student used these shapes with a partner to help figure out the fraction questions on the board. I thought this part of the lesson went great as well, but naturally, the students started getting a little too loud and began to play with the shapes. The lesson unfortunately started going downhill from here. As I moved on towards the end of the lesson, I forgot to tell the students to put the shapes up so they were very loud and unfocused at this point. I kept having to get on to them and Missy could see that I was getting extremely frustrated.

After the lesson, I met with Missy and she told me, to my surprise, that she thought the fraction lesson went very well. She said she noticed how frustrated I got and that I should have just stopped, gotten my thoughts together, gotten the shapes from the students, and THEN moved on once I gained control of the class again. She gave me more helpful feedback and it all went much better than I thought! :) This Thursday Missy is coming to observe me for my 2nd and final observation and I will be teaching a guided reading lesson with the low level group. I have worked with these students before and have done guided reading lessons with them before, so I feel pretty confident! Wish me luck! :)

P.S. Sorry this blog post ended up being very long.....I didn't realize how much I was typing! :)

Full Week of Field Experience

Wow, it seems like we haven't written blogs in a while! I had a fabulous spring break and I hope everyone else did too! :)

So as I mentioned in my previous post, my 2nd grade students have been working on persuasive papers about their opinion on school uniforms. I must say that luckily the writing workshop time went better during the full week I was in the classroom. The students were finishing up writing their final copies of their papers and I could tell they were somewhat excited to finish this long project. My teacher allowed them to share their papers with the class and I heard many great reasons and word choice from the students. In Camille A. Allen's article we were assigned to read, it was clear that topic choice is a VERY important part of students' writing. Allowing the students to have a say in what they are writing about develops an interest and connection that then produces more engagement and success. I related this to my 2nd grade class because my mentor teacher did a great job of letting them choose as a class a topic that they can relate to and are currently interested in. Since the school has been trying to decide whether to insert school uniforms into next year's school policy, this topic is relative to the students' lives. I think it is great that my mentor teacher allowed them to do a persuasive piece on their opinions on school uniforms because it gave the students an opportunity to say what THEY think and why. Oftentimes children do not get a say in matters such as these, but since my class and even other classes in the school wrote persuasive pieces about their opinions, I really think the school board will take their opinions and reasons into consideration when making the final decision. I know that my class is only 7 and 8 year olds, but they definitely do have strong opinions about whether they want to wear school uniforms or not! (haha) Their passion about the topic was very clear in their writing and both my mentor teacher and I were very pleased with the students' final drafts. It was perfect timing to read Allen's article after this successful writing workshop experience because I was able to relate to how topic choice really does play a significant role in students' writing.

Good Days and Bad Days in the Writing Workshop (chapters 7, 8, 19)

I am placed in a second grade classroom this semester and have enjoyed getting to see the students reading and writing more compared to what I saw in Kindergarten last semester. My teacher typically reads them a book and then they have a writing assignment in relation to the text. For the past several weeks, persuasive writing has been the focus so my teacher has read many children's literature books that demonstrate good persuasive techniques and word choice. Thursday I actually implemented the writing workshop lesson because my teacher was absent and the substitute wanted me to teach it instead of her. The book my teacher left for a read aloud was Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late. I then had the students go back to their desks and write reasons they could give their parents to persuade them to let the student stay up late. I told them to use the pigeon's reasons for ideas but to come up with reasons of their own. We ended up having plenty of time after writing their reasons, so I allowed students to stand up in front of the class and share their reasons for staying up late to the class. We found that many students had similar reasons and some had completely different reasons that were neat to hear about. I was pleased that the writing workshop went well and that I was able to teach the lesson sort of on the spot.

It is interesting to me that the chapters we were assigned to read this week involve distractions in the writing workshop because the next day (Friday) after my successful experience Thursday, the writing workshop was chaotic and stressful to both the teacher and myself. Writing workshop time is right after lunch each day from 12:20-1:10. The students are very wound up from lunchtime and have a difficult time settling down and getting back into the classroom mode. This particular day, my teacher did not read a text but instead had the students get out a paper they had already been working on. The paper was their list of reasons supporting their personal opinion about school uniforms. Each student had already chosen if they were for or against school uniforms. On the Smartboard the teacher pulled up the document with the reasons for and against uniforms that she had written down from the previous class discussion. She also had a list of persuasive words that the students should choose from to use in their persuasive pieces. My teacher informed the class that she and I would walk around the room and oversee their work, helping individuals as needed and also helping them edit for their final copy. This seemed like it was going to be a successful, easygoing writing workshop because the students had already chosen their side and had already begun their papers...........I was wrong. It was a disaster. Many students were talking, some were walking around the room, some were yelling mine and the teacher's name to help them, etc. I was trying to help so many children at once that it was just a mess! When I would be leaned over helping one student add some persuasive words, another student would be tapping me consistently on the shoulder from behind and yelling out questions about his/her paper. My mentor teacher was having the same problem. She kept trying to quiet the class down but it was not working. Needless to say, I had a headache by the time this writing workshop was over. It proved to be unsuccessful because many of the students who were misbehaving and not focused during the writing workshop, now only had about 1 sentence on their paper.....whereas some students were already making their final copy. So now that it was time to go to specials, my teacher scolded the class for their behavior during the workshop and threatened that if they behaved this way during writing workshop again, they would start losing recess. I felt as though this was not the ideal way to try to solve the problem of disorder and craziness. After reading Ray's chapters, I tried to come up with ways to fix the writing workshop for future lessons, but I'm still wondering what I would be able to do as the student intern to make changes without stepping on my mentor teacher's toes so to speak.

It's interesting to see how the writing workshop went just fine Thursday, but then was chaotic and not very productive the very next day on Friday. I guess this definitely proves that writing workshops are oftentimes unpredictable, just as Ray discusses in the textbook.

Conferring & Sharing (chapters 14,15, & 17)

First of all, I want to say.......HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!!!! :)

So as I was reading, I was simultaneously trying to think of what I would say when conferring with my future students. I was thinking to myself, "How could someone like me who is not a very strong writer, tell students tips of how to make their writing better?" I began reading on and saw that on page 161, Ray says that "With any opening inquiry, our goal at the beginning of a conference is to get the student talking" (Ray, p. 161). This gave me some peace of mind because it showed that the teacher does not have to do all of the talking in the conference. Some things that you (Ms. Friese) helped us with in just a whole group setting due to time restraints, was to give us knowledge about the bullet points actually listed on page 164. You have shown us how living our lives as writers can be us just simply writing in our notebooks and saving these pieces to show our students one day. I remember you specifically telling me that it's okay if I don't currently have any pieces to share with my future students because with our writer's notebook for this class we will be planning and developing different types of pieces. The bullet points on page 164 also go on to list getting and giving responses to writing which you have already done since you have completed our first notebook check.

It has been both neat and helpful that you have been modeling a writing workshop conference for us so that we can see firsthand how it is done. Of course you had to technically do your "conferring" via Post-It notes in our notebooks because of the limited amount of time we have each week. Ideally you would have had inidvidual conferences with each of us, but I like how you improvised and still gave us feedback in regards to our writing. You taking the time to read my notebook made me want to produce better quality writing. This goes along with what I read on page 174 that states, "For many of our writers, talk is essential because when they are writing every single day, they just need to get some regular feedback to keep their momentum going" (Ray, p. 174). I felt like this section of the textbook was totally talking about me personally! Haha. :) I also could relate to the section titled "Simple Response Share" because it reminded me of when I shared my narrative draft with my classmates sitting at my table a couple weeks ago. I was willing to share by reading my narrative draft out of my notebook to this small group of girls, but I would not have wanted to raise my hand and read it in front of our whole class.