real-life inquiry

For my real-life inquiry I chose to look more into the information students come to the classroom with. I am placed in a kindergarten classroom for my internship so I am blessed with the opportunity to see what knowledge students have when coming into their very first day of school ever! Before entering kindergarten, all students are assessed to see what skills they do or do not have.

The assessment typically is done before the first day of school. The student meets with the teacher in a one-on-one environment with the parents absent. The assessment is not extremely standardized as far as instructions so the teacher I observed made the tasks more fun by referring to them as games. The tasks (or games) covered a wide range of ability including knowing some basic personal information, colors, parts of the body, math skills, and letter identification. For this assignment, I focused my notes on the letter identification part of the assessment.

Although our class is made up of students from diverse backgrounds, many seemed to share the same strengths and same weaknesses. For students who are performing on an average level, they were able to identify about half of 25 mixed upper and lower case letters on a page. Students easily named the letters A, B, C, X, Z, S, and T. They had more trouble with the letters P, Q, V, U, W, K, and R. I asked my mentor teacher why this was and he explained the most students can easily recognize the first few letter of the alphabet because they have heard A,B, and C quite often. They remember X and Z because those are the ending letters and they are distinct. Students have knowledge of S and T because they are letters that have distinct sounds and are commonly encountered. The main reason for why students make mistakes when identifying the more troublesome letters is because they resemble one another. P, R, and K are commonly mixed up because of their similar shape. U, V, and W are also misidentified because of the same reason.

I am very interested to see how students build off of these initial skills. We have been in school for 2 weeks now and I can already see how these skills are playing a part in students' learning. Some students are absorbing every bit of information such as letter names and sounds. Other students are some moving forward as much, however; they are solidifying the knowledge they came to the classroom with. Having prior knowledge on what students knew before school will let me observe their growth and take note on what other factors, besides prior knowledge, may play a part in the learning process.

vocabulary

There are so many things that are different in today's classroom than the one I grew up in. One big difference is how vocabulary is approached. All through elementary school I was subject to the boring lessons of Wordly Wise. Even just thinking about it makes me cringe a bit. We were supposed to take them home, complete the lessons, then return and check it together in class. Well, of course, this rarely happened. I can distinctly remember sitting in 3rd grade and coloring in random bubbles as the teacher walked around to see if we had completed our work. Then, I would just fill in the right answer as we were supposed to be marking our mistakes. The article "Vocabulary Lessons" provided a number of suggestions on how to engages students in the material rather than just present it to them and hope it sticks. One of my favorites was allowing them to contribute to the word wall when they locate a difficult word. This would provide a sense of ownership to their own knowledge and it give them an opportunity to contribute to the classroom community of learners. Now honestly, which method seems more effective?

http://www.setonbooks.com/viewone.php?ToView=P-VO06-11

comprehension

the Velcro theory

I am teaching lower grades so I am always looks for ways to adapt the concepts and strategies we learn about for younger students. The Velcro theory is a great start for comprehension in lower grades. 

In Gegory and Cahill's article, Kindergartners Can Do It, Too!, they introduced the idea of the 'Velcro Theory'. The Velcro Theory suggests that it is easier to remember and understand new information when you connect it to something that already exists in your brain. Lucky for us, Kindergartners are great at doing this! Have you ever had a conversation with a 5 year old where you say one thing and they then want to tell you about six other stories that kind of have to do with that? Well, that is the Velcro Theory in action! The article also explained that just making the connection is not enough. You must also sort the information, visualize it, and explore it by asking questions and testing information. 

http://lucassdocblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/video-as-mental-velcro.html

fluency activity- choral reading

Choral Reading is one way to promote fluency through reading aloud in groups. 

      "Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students. Choral reading helps build students' fluency, self-confidence, and motivation. Because students are reading aloud together, students who may ordinarily feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud have built-in support."

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/choral_reading/

One way we would like to implement this in the classroom is through short, daily choral reading. We would like to use choral reading throught the use of song lyrics. This activity would be done once a day before they leave school for the day. We would a six week grading period with a popular and appropirate song. Each child will be given a copy of the lyrics to read along with the class. On the first Friday of the six weeks the class will be split into five groups. Each group will be instructed to write their own song about a topic given by the teacher to the beat of the popular song that was used that week. After doing so, each of the following 5 weeks, one of the groups songs will be used as the daily fluency activity. 

An example to start with might be a popular Justin Beiber song like the one below. 

Baby, baby, baby, oh
Like baby, baby, baby, no
Like baby, baby, baby, oh
I thought you'd always be mine, mine

For you, I would have done whatever
And I just can't believe we're here together
And I wanna play it cool, but I'm losin' you
I'll buy you anything, I'll buy you any ring

And I'm in pieces, baby fix me
And just shake me 'til you wake me from this bad dream
I'm goin' down, down, down, down
And I just can't believe my first love won't be around

fluency

fluency is the ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression.

While reading, Cunningham and Allington discussed using a word wall to promote fluency. I was very excited about this because I had just finished making the word wall for the kindergarten class I am interning in. The word wall I made only has names. It shows each classmates' name and then has a picture by them. I thought this was great because an earlier article had suggested using familiar words when teaching early learners how to read. The students know one another's name so they are very familiar with the sounds each letter makes in that word.

One thing I read in the book that I thought was a great idea was using different colored paper for each word.  This allows students to separate the words they can get confused with like "what" and "where".

One modification I would make to what the book suggests is that I think it is important to print or write the words very neatly on a separate piece of paper then put that one on the colored paper. When printing the word on the separate sheet, you should cut high and low around the letters that dip and rise above the middle line. This shows students that some letters are tall and go to the trees and some are long and go to the dirt.

http://frogsbeesundertheseas.blogspot.com/2011/07/making-year-monday.html

Word Wall with student names

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/classroom-solutions/2012/03/spring-cleaning-%E2%80%94-tips-organizing-classroom

The teacher cut around the words to show that the l,d, and h all rise up when writing.

word study

I am in a kindergarten classroom this year so I try to adapt each reading and activity to a lower level. While reading Yopp and Yopp's article "Ten important words plus:  A strategy for building word knowledge", I especially liked the activity about finding words to create the main idea. I thought this would be perfect for a kindergarten class to do! We could do it during a read aloud and they can write down the words they think are the most important to the story. Afterwards, I thought it would be a fun idea to share the words they wrote down and make a Wordle out of them! Do you know what a Wordle is? If not, check it out! 

www,wordle.net

http://mskreul.edublogs.org/files/2009/09/Choose-book-wordle

The more times you put a word into the site, the bigger it is ! So if my kindergarten class read Goodnight Moon and everyone thought 'moon' was an important word, it would be big in the Wordle! 

phonemic awareness & phonics

For this topic, I chose to read Kathleen F. Clark's article "What can I say besides "sound it out": Coaching word recognition in beginning reading". I chose this as one of the two assigned readings because that is one of the biggest questions I had about teaching reading- what else is there to say? I feel like the more I get into the program, the more I learn about how my 'go to' teaching phrases need replacing. I used to say things like 'sound it out', 'look harder', and 'keep looking at it'. In reality, what does it exactly mean to look at something harder? As if the students were looking at it softly?

The article provided many new ideas on how to help readers! Here are a few:
- Can you sound it out? (typical, BUT THEN) Now take a running start!
- What do you know about that word?
- What can we do when we are stuck?
- highlighting parts of the word as you go
- Think about all the sounds that letter can make.


& my favorite:

Let's look for a chunk in there. 

or

Let's find the little word in there. 

This makes so much sense to me! When faced with any problem, whether in life or learning, I always break it down. Big deals are easier to handle when they are broken into lots of  little deals. So, it makes total sense to me for big words to be tackled by identifying what we already know. Like the example from the article, 'in' is a word most students can get. Showing them that they already know half the word is just the confidence boost some students need to keep going! This method shows them how they can take on bigger words with basic the skills they already have. 

http://teacherbitsandbobs.blogspot.com/2012/01/magic-spoons.html

This activity practices creating words by just changing the first letter. I would love to modify the activity by using real words instead of just letter pairs. This would build students' skills in recognizing chunks and little words in bigger words.