Tina's Book Talk - The Lightening Thief!

   (1899 KB)
Listen on posterous

Posted via email from Extended Cohort 10's podcasts

Tina's Book Talk - The Lightening Thief!

(4237 KB)
Watch on posterous

Posted via email from Extended Cohort 10's podcasts

Like Balancing Round Stones....

I decided to take my chances and look into some of the "suggested reading" for this course. I was pleasantly surprised by Gerald Duffy's Teaching and the Balancing of Round Stones. It was one of the most refreshing and exciting articles I have read in this program. I love how developed such an artful metaphore for teaching, and after reading his article I too am convinced that teaching is much like people trying to balance round stones. Too many of our articles are telling us what to think and exactly how to teach this or that. Duffy's insight that teachers become teachers becuase of the very fact that they are different is so refreshing.

Throughout this program I have been looked at like the black sheep, the "wild child" that is going to disrupt our schooling system. Duffy gives me hope -- hope that my "uniqueness" and my ability to think for myself is in fact a useful trait in teaching. I love how Duffy describes the many "balancing acts" that we as teachers are expected to accomplish. Society wants us to produce independant thinking democratic citizens. Yet, they want us to have perfectly orderly classrooms. Contradiction? Yes, but a great teacher is able to create the perfect balance in his or her classroom. Districts want us to teach every student to their individual needs, yet we are supposed to expect the world of them. Again, a teacher must produce the perfect balance.

I also love the question Duffy poses:

• What particular thing do you want to accomplish as a teacher?


• What indispensible message do you want to communicate to your students?


• What do you want your students to eventually become?

These questions really made me ponder why I am here and what i want to accomplish. It would take me days to come to even the slightest conclusion to these questions, but reading them has given me an entire new light on the next few months. I am excited to enter my student teaching with these in mind. What is one thing that really want to accomplish? What do I want my students to accomplish? What do I want my students to become? What a wonderful question! I want my students to be free thinkers. I want them to challenge everything and desire to learn as much as they possibly can. I want them to believe in themselves above all and to believe in eachother no matter what they wish to accomplish throughout their lives. They may not want to become lawyers and doctors and I want them to know that that is okay. I want them to be given the tools to explore the world and discover something that they are passonate about. I want them to love life and love learning!

Students, please take out your text books...

Shared reading and guided reading are two wonderful, yet very different teaching styles. I think that as a teacher the goal is to blend these two styles into your daily classroom routine as much as possible.

Shared reading is a great way to introduce students to a new genre. Last week in my main placement, my MT was introducing our students to Non-Fiction books. She used the document-camera to display the book on the screen for the class to see and read along. We have many ELL students in our class, so it was important for her to pick a text that was not too dificult. The lesson was focusing on the "features of non-fiction", not so much the information within the text. Under the docu-cam she displayed the full spread of the text, pointing out how the pictures are photographs, not drawings. She used "cognitive-apprenticeship" to "think out loud" while she read through the text and discovered that the photographs had "words under them that talk about the picture." She told the students that "readers call these words 'captions'."

Guided reading is equally as important, although much harder to execute in a classroom. My MT will sometimes have me work with a small reading group of similar level readers, but I find that there is little 'extra' time during the day to incorportate specialized reading groups. This is very unfortunate becuase students (especially the highest performers and lowest performers) gain SO much small group teaching. I think that it is mostly a classroom management issue, and like Routman explains, you have to let the class fend for itself unless it is an absolute emergency (which she has yet to see!). Yet, as a new teacher the idea of letting the students play "Lord of the Flies" for 20 minutes seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I have seen guided reading successfully executed in my Dyad placement. My teacher would set out the literacy centers once a week on Mondays. The centers rotated every 2 months and begin in October, so the excitement and level of engagement remains high among the kindergarteners. Students are assigned centers in pairs and the teacher is able to hold a meaningful conference with 4 to 5 students without interruption. She also requests parent volunteers to come in during this time, resulting in 2 Monday volunteers who are familar with the routine and extremely helpful.

My Class vs Our Class

This blog is slightly out of order... this is in regards to last weeks reading:

Routman discusses just about everything in her books Reading Essentials and Writing Essentials, yet in the first few chapters of the first mentioned book one idea stood out in my mind-- how to set up your classroom.

As a new-teacher-to-be I am full of excitement about MY new classroom. It's not my master teacher's classroom that I am using as a stage to practice my teaching skills. No, this is MY classroom. It represents who I am as a teacher and I want parents to walk in on the first day and think to themselves, "This is going to be a fantastic year!"

And then I read Routman's ideas in chapter 2. Oh my gosh! Talk about taking what I thought I knew and turning it completely upside down, and well... me being okay with it. In fact, more than okay. In love with her ideas is more appropriate. Its not MY classroom. It is our classroom, where the teacher and students come every day to learn from eachother. After reading her ideas about allowing the students to help set up the classroom during the first few days of the school year, I realized how important it was for my students to feel at home in our classroom just as I would like to feel. Looking back at my preschool classroom, there were plenty of Routman's ideas that I had done. I always tried to cover as many blank spaces with student art. I took to heart my boss's theory of "If I walk into your classroom any day of the week, I should instantly know what you are learning in the classroom." I love this idea and I made sure that students' work was hung as soon as it was dry. If we studied dinosours for two weeks, by Tuesday of week one I would have two bulletin boards full of dino-art. The giant volcanoe overflowing with lava? Group art project! The boarders? Dino-footprint stamp project! I thought that meant it was their classroom. I thought I had it down to a tee.

And then Routman through my world in a tizzy! The kids deciding where the recyceling bin goes? Where homework sheets should be turned in? Where the art table should stand and how often we switch jobs... or which jobs we have for that matter? No... they couldn't be in charge of that! That would be chaos. Or would it? Routman makes very solid arguements for why students should be an active participant in the layout and dynamics of the classroom. The more stake they have in the building of their enviornment, the more respect they will have for their classroom day in and day out.

I am happy to say that Routman has influenced my ideas about classroom set-up. I went from having a very materialistic view of "sharing" the classroom with my students to having a wonderfully democradic outlook on the design and day to day runnings of our classroom.

Phonemic Awareness is /f/u/n/

We had a wonderful introducation to phonemic awareness in Tony's class last quarter and it is to me one of the most fascinating aspects of elementry education. My previous experience as a toddler teacher introduced me to just how early students begin to pick up on phonemic awareness. It really is amazing to think that as young as two years old, we are making the phonological awareness connections. Young children love rhymes and can easily pick them up. By the later toddler age, you can witness kids exploring phonological awareness by immitating rhymes with "made up" words, such as the "Tina-Tina-Tina, Fe-Fi-Fo Bina!" rhymes. Other rhyming songs are thick with phonological awareness teachings, such as the "Apples and Bananas/ Epples and Beneners" song. It wasn't until this course and its sister course last quarter that I was able to make the connection between classic rhyming songs and reading. I find it absolutely fascinating!

After reading "Put Reading First" I have a much greater understanding of how to approach the teaching of reading. In my toddler classroom, I was often using a non-systematic approach to teaching the letter sounds without even realizing it. I would often go through the alphabet and model the letter sounds, "A... ahh ahh, B... bah bah, etc". I had no idea that this was in fact, not entirely useful to my students. Using a systematic and explicit approach, including letter blends in association to words (verses the written letter) makes much more sense, especially at the youngest years of education when written language resembles doodles more than words.

I understand that phonetic education is useful and necessary for students to be able to read and write. Yet, I believe that in these early years (toddler - kindergarten) that phonemic awareness is a much stronger approach. For students who do not have an understanding of written language, phonological and phonemic awareness is better achieved in a systematic and explicit teaching method. With a good base education, students can jump into phonics with a greater understanding of why a sound represents a particular letter/ letter combination (verses a sound representing a particular part of a spoken word).

Invntiv Speling II: The Happy Medium

Inventive spelling is a topic that runs through my head again and again as I continue my journey in the world of education. I am constantly pondering, "How much 'inventive-ness' is too much?" In previous blogs I have already admitted my love for inventive spelling and how I wish I could convince the world that it's okay to miss spell words as long as meaning and comprehension is not lost. Yet, as an educator I am torn between allowing my kids to be creative and run freely with their writing, and the daunting fear of letting them continue yet another year with incorrect information on the proper spelling of words.

Finally-- some answers! Regie Routman's Writing Essentials touches on this topic in a refreshing way. In the last section of chapter 7, Routman state, "While inventive spelling is great for freeing kids to use words they might not typically write, sometimes we accept inventive spelling for words kids are capable of writing conventionally" (Routman 163). He states that it is reasonable to expect students to be able to spell a bank of words. For kindergarteners, the bank includes "I", "my" and "can." Since students at this stage are using words such as "I", "my" and "can" quite often in their writing, Routman believes that they might as well practice them correctly. Inventive spelling is still okay for words that students would not normally be expected to know (or be able to sound out phonetically), but if they are common words in their writing the expectations for conventional writing should be raised.

This is a refreshing outlook because it is the happy medium I have been searching for. Inventive spelling is okay, BUT it is also okay to ask a student to check his spelling on "was" written as "wz". And just as I was thinking, "Great, but how do I do this effectively?", the next few pages are full of practical applications for any classroom.

Routman suggests constructing Word Walls (Routman 165) with commonly used words that you should expect your students to spell correctly. Other Word Walls can specialized to include content from the unit in study, seasonal words, family words, students names, etc. Additionally, using Word Walls to highlight smaller words within long words will help students foster their ability to spell complex words by breaking them down.

I think Routman is very thoughtful in his approach to inventive spelling, finding a balance that makes me feel confident in given students freedom without sending them off to the 1st grade with "wrong" spelling skills.