Adomat Article: Actively Engaging with Stories Through Drama

I am so glad i went back to read this article because I learned a lot. I always assumed that acting things out will engage the students into the content of a reading, but this article gave me better insight into how to do it. I can not wait to have my first class of students, and turning reading into a fun and interesting activity. I hope that I can execute integrating drama into the classroom effectively and to the point where the students' interests will be sparked to want to continue learning or expand their knowledge of the content at hand. One thing that I wish there was more of in the article was how to engage students that don't necessarily enjoy or even want to participate in a drama activity. What can I say or do to make them enjoy it more? Also, what about the kids who, when in a drama setting, their performance takes away from their reading and comprehension. I know this might be rare, but I know it happens and I wouldn't want to have a student fall further behind when the activity is supposed to advance and enhance their understanding, not take away from it.

story telling- newkirk

I did not like this article at all and found it hard to follow. I am on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to story telling. I believe that everything absolutely needs to follow a point and a line of relevant details. By not doing this, it is simply rambling, which in my eyes is a waste of everyone's time. I believe that these types of "conversations" are best kept inside your head until they have formed a more comprehensible thought. Yes, not everything will be perfect and sometimes you need help forming this thought, but you should at least try. I like to live by the idea of, "Think before you speak."

Sarah Burger's Response 5

The reading I did not get to read when assigned but wanted to go back to this week was the Debbie Miller Chapter 5.  I really enjoy reading Debbie Miller's book Reading with Meaning and was bummed that I did not have time to read that chapter on schema when it was assigned.  Having read the chapters before and after chapter 5, I wanted to go back and fill in the missing piece.  After going back and reading it this week, I was able to get one step closer to reading the entire Reading with Meaning text.  I was also able to gain insight on how to teach children about schema and how to model and get children to use their schema.  Without reading this chapter now, I would have had to go back to it in the future when I have my own classroom and want to teach schema.  By reading the chapter this week, I was able to take notes on the important topics so in my busy future as an elementary teacher I will already have a list ready of how to teach schema.

Reading Response #4

Summary for Goodman: The Goodman article focused on miscues and how teachers should analyze their readers’ abilities.  First, the author explained that a miscue, like an error, is an unexpected response cued by the reader’s knowledge of their language and concepts of the world.  All readers make miscues so it is important for the teacher to listen for miscues in their students’ reading.  In order to analyze a student’s reading, there is a miscue analysis procedure discussed by Goodman that should be used.  First, the reading must be new to the reader but have familiar material.  The reading must also contain a beginning, middle, and end.  Before the student starts reading, the teacher should go over the procedure that is going to occur during the analysis.  While the student reads, the teacher marks notes on her own copy.  After the reading, the student is asked to retell what he read.  These are the basics of the procedure.  The rest of the Goodman article went into even more depth on miscues and analysis by discussing research and providing examples.  

Running Recording: The video shows a teacher analyzing the student’s reading. The teacher explained the process in a very positive way to her student to try and put her at ease and get her to read in the most natural environment possible. The only thing I would have done differently as the teacher, is I would not have said that I was going to look over the notes on the reading to “see if she grew up.” If you say that and the student does not move up to a harder level, then they student may become very discouraged. I would say, “I am going to look over these results to see what we need to work on next.”

Education Example: Running Record/ Fluency Test: This video show how the teacher scores the student when doing a fluency. Because she has the technology to do so, she records it for multiple reasons. She uses it to check her scoring, to let the student hear herself, and for the parents to hear it. By everyone listening to it they all know what they need to be working on together.

Quotes:

Goodman: “A major assumption of miscue research is that everything that happens during reading is caused by what the reader knows about language and the world.”

Goodman: “In miscue analysis, it is not the number of miscues that a reader makes that is important but the quality of those miscues. Quality is determined by the degree to which a miscue disrupts or enhances the meaning of the text.”

Example: This video does a good job of breaking down the process in a different way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL7zC6mbzEY

half way through expectations

I expect to learn techniques to teach reading. I know that we recently learned about phonetic and whole approach reading. My question is how do I approach actually teaching a child to read? Do I make a mix between the two? Is there a technique that is very successful for teaching? I have ideas as to how to integrate pop culture into my classroom, but I want to hear and gather more ideas on how to do this.

3/12 Expectations

In the second half of this course, the major thing I still want to learn is how to teach reading.  For example, how do you help the kids learn to sound out words and use phonics?  Also, I know we have touched on curriculums and are working on making our own 2 week lesson plan but I still would like to learn more about implementing curriculums in the classroom.

Reading Response #3

Summary:

• Chapter 1:
• Establish a framework that works for you and your schedule that is consistent, smooth in structure, and made clear to the students.
• Make sure you have a mini-lesson, a learning target, a reading time, a share time, and an individual conference time.
• Learn to gradually release the responsibility of the students learning while reading from yourself, to them. You do this through slowly weening the off of your modeling and moving to guided practice, to independent practice, to applying strategies on their own.
• Create an environment where the students feel like a single unit instead of a group of individuals, allows for environment full of accepted thinking. We need to make sure that we do not label ourselves as the only one worth sharing new discoveries with. Sharing with one of their peers is just as good, if not better than sharing with the teacher.
• When building relationships, you need to know what your boundaries will be and how you are going to deal with certain things that will come up in your class. The texts gives various scenarios and one way to handle each one, but in reality, a teacher needs to find ways to respond that are both comfortable and acceptable. And above all, we need to establish trust with our students quickly and effectively.

• Chapter 2:
• Develop a list of take-away messages you want your students to walk away with about reading and the workshop process.
• Develop both a weekly and monthly overall plan that guides the structure of your class and its reading routine.
• In the beginning, a student’s book selection should be based mostly on interest and less on the exact level of instruction they may be at. This will hopefully start out the year with the students being more willing to read because it is exciting instead of being afraid of reading workshop because they are constantly frustrated with their reading from the start.
• Reading aloud is one of the most important introductory activities for any reading strategy or even just to introduce reading in general.
• The beginning of the year is meant for developing routines and habits of your students by modeling your expectations and providing them with various opportunities to practice the steps in order to slowly make it second-nature.

• Chapter 3:

Overall, this chapter is about how a teacher can help facilitate their students book choices and mold them into more educationally sound choices while keeping them fun and interesting. We have to figure out how to make students want to find books that will further their education or have the skills to find educational elements in books that they love and do further research on.

• Book Selection: Make sure you have a wide variety of not only books and reading material, but also the ways in which the students read these materials. Whether this means alone, with a partner, as a class, or one-on-one with the teacher, mix it up, make it fun and interesting for the students.
• Content: When students are interested in the material and therefore have high motivation to finish it, they are more likely to complete and also come away with the important aspects of the reading.
• Schema for Themselves as Readers and Motivation: Making the students assume the responsibility themselves to further their research and their understanding of topics on their own will only be developed if it is slowly scaffolded by you, as a teacher.
• Purpose: Explaining to your students why you introduce them to certain readings will make them want to be more invested in their reading because they will understand why it is important. Also explaining to them why you read what you do will make them more eager to make their own selections and share them with their peers.
• Assessment: Making sure your students understand that they have control over their own learning will make them want to keep track of their own successes and share their discoveries. We need to make sure students “learn that smart is something that you get - that through hard work and effort, they can have the power to make themselves smarter and achieve their goals.”
• Work Activity Time: Make sure to use multimodal learning and a wide range of materials in order to stretch out your student’s learning to the highest possible level of understanding.

• Chapter 4:
• Thinking Aloud: Just like anything else, if you expect your students to think a certain way, you need to teach them. Teaching them how you think out loud allows them to see an example first hand.
• Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance: Having a routine allows students to not only become comfortable in the school environment, but become more and more independent in their learning.
• Authenticity and Precise Language: Make sure your examples are genuine and not made-up just for the children’s sake. Make sure you use language that you expect your students to use and be consistent in the phrases and vocabulary that you use. They will repeat and reuse these phrases more than you realize.
• Active Reading: Make sure you develop your students into active readers so that they have the skills to read with meaning and make connections to their own lives as well as other things they have learned about or current events. Especially with the characters themselves, students can use these connections in order to feel like they are actually in the story, relate further, and determine what they have learned from reading what that character has been through.
• Making Connections: Take advantage of small-group work and let it develop into an opportunity for students to collaborate together and have student-led discussions. Allowing them to verbalize their ideas and personal connections with their peers is a great way for them to grow together as a class as well as individually.

Quotes:

• Chapter 1: “Once you’ve found what’s true for you, stand up for what you know is right.” - p. 7
• Chapter 2: “September is all about building relationships, establishing trust, creating working literate environments, and getting to know children as readers and learners…” - p. 17
• Chapter 3: “People who visit often say to me, ‘That’s so cute how they say ‘Yes, thank you.’  How did you get them to do that?’  Maybe it’s cute, but that’s not why I ask the children to respond that way.  It’s about tone, it’s about respect, and it’s part of the language we use as we live and learn together for six-and-a-half hours every day.” - p. 38
• Chapter 4: “Teaching how to make thoughtful book selections is hard work, but it’s not out of their reach, or ours.” - p. 40

Example:
Reading Workshop: What It Looks Like in My Classroom
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top_teaching/2009/10/reading-workshop?page=1

This link is to an article written by a teacher about her reading workshop.  This article has good information, pictures, resources, and a video.

Reading Response #2

Summary:

The Doake article discussed the importance of early readers being read to at a young age and growing up in a book oriented home.  This behavior is known as reading-like behavior and is very important in a young child’s life.  It also describes how the enjoyment that comes from reading is just as important as the reading itself and it can not be replicated during any other activity which is the main reason why reading-like behavior develops. It is the stimulation a child is given through reading that allows children to repeat back significant amounts of a story even after only being read it one or two times, and it is the enjoyment of reading that propels them into wanting to read more and more and tell even more complex stories.

The article went on to describe how reading-like behavior develops, and the characteristics of reading-like behavior.  Doake separates the development of reading-like behavior into four different strategies. These were, mumble reading, cooperative reading, completion reading, and echo reading.

At the end of the article, the author described the implications for teachers relating to reading-like behavior.  These included realizing that children are always ready to read, the importance of using books in a child’s home life, keeping a collection of books with an abundance of imagination and interests, and making connections between home reading and school reading as well as reading and writing.

Quotes:
“This learning becomes even easier when it is permitted to operate in a noncorrective, no-fail environment where the children are encouraged to experiment and approximate in their attempts to “read.””

Examples:
This examples shows the “noncorrective, no-fail environment” that is discussed in the article and allows the child to learn and enjoy reading. He is not afraid of making the wrong sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FqLucRWkSs

Reading Response #1

Summary:

• Cambourne Article:  The Cambourne article talks about finding a teaching pedagogy and understanding how people learn through her teaching, observation, and research. Cambourne used to have a very common pedagogical approach of repetition of skills and habits that are broken down into smaller, more manageable parts, praise appropriate responses and extinguish inappropriate responses, and learners must be told what to learn and how to go about doing so because they are too immature. Through her experience and research she realizes that this is not working and that it takes up so much time and energy. Her new ideas involved modeling her teaching after everyday learning that children automatically do. She now believes that you must use immersion, demonstration, engagement, expectations, responsibility, approximations, employment, and responses as a way of being when teaching. She then tests this out with some classroom teachers in order to answer any questions and it does prove that this is an effective way of teaching.

• Shannon Article:  This article discussed how there is a correlation between social class and reading instruction.  Generally, if you are of a lower social class then you will be placed in a lower reading group.  This basis generally comes from test scores but on occasion will come from an “idea type”.  After being placed in the different reading levels, teachers place different expectations onto their students.  They facilitate the lower and higher groups in different ways, a way that causes the lower groups to fall even more behind.  The solution to this problem can be dealt with by either an academic, affective, or emancipatory solution.

Quotes: 

• Cambourne Article:  “It doesn’t matter whether learners are engaged in learning to iron, play tennis, write an economics essay, tie shoelaces, or acquire the oral language of the culture; they are continually asking themselves, ‘How am I doing?’”

This quote emphasises the fact that constant evaluation is needed throughout the learning process and as teachers, it is our job to facilitate this effectively. This is why allowing the children to work collaboratively in pairs, together in small groups, as well as all together as a class, is just as important as working independently.

• Shannon Article:  “...the most important finding of ecological research is that the socialization function of schools operates differently for students of different races and classes. Disadvantaged students tend to be socialized for subordination; advantaged students are socialized for responsibility...” (page 3, last paragraph)

This quote expresses the way in which teachers can often teach students certain things simply through the way they are taught.  Teaching children the material of the class is important, but overall, its the things they learn about dealing with people, authority, and respect that will carry on with them for the rest of their lives. We might not have a classroom lesson on respect or how to talk to one another, but the kids learn it through the way you address them, how you allow them to address you, and how you address other adults within the classroom. These “teachings” are subconscious, yet we need to bring them to the conscious and make sure we are teaching all of our students exactly what we want them to take away from that aspect of ourselves as teachers and as human beings.

Connections:

Overall, both of these articles are attempting to make teachers take a step back and think about everything they are teaching and how they are teaching it. Some things we do instinctively without thinking them all the way through because they make sense in our heads. However, both of these articles, although dealing with different reasonings, intend for teachers to slow down and realize how each decision, whether made consciously or not, can affect these little sponges they call their students. This extends from choosing materials, the groups we place students in, what we address in each reading or subject matter, and even how we go about addressing these areas.

1-8 Expectations

I expect to have a lot of work throughout the semester. I know I will need to develop a system of time management in order to balance all of the work from every class. I hope to learn a lot about myself as a teacher and be better prepared to go out into the workforce. I also want too broaden my children's book knowledge and repertoire for my future classes.

- Caitlin

Further inquiries:

• I would really like to be able to connect a children's book with something that I am doing in math. I know that kids are expected to be able to write through their thinking at some point in elementary school and even if its not the grade I am teaching, I would like to see how I can get the students to start thinking about how reading also intermixes with math, not just the other subjects.
• I know this might just come with trial and error and experience, but I have also has anxiety about how to introduce all of the routines my students will have for each subject including reading. whether it be centers or how to check out a book, I feel like I will definitely overwhelm the kids with information trying to introduce centers or the writing process for example. I know that you will need to break it down and take it step by step, but I tend to be a perfectionist so I know I will have problems with it.

1/8 Expectations Emily Cerra

My expectations for this course are to become more prepared and confident in identifying and reading mile stones and components in order to make decisions on how to approach teaching individuals and groups of students. One of my largest fears is figuring out how to approach a curriculum and make it individualized. This will be especially difficult within my first few years. I expect that this will help prepare me to do this and find the best ways to tackle this ongoing project. 

1/8 Expectations

During this course, I expect to learn how to effectively teach reading.  So far, we have not learned how to teach so I am hoping that this course gives me the tools needed to teach my students how to read and how to implement a reading program in the classroom.  I also expect that this class will be fun and helpful but not necessarily easy.  I know that I will need to put time into this class and the block in general but that in the end I will become a great teacher.

Sarah Burger