Week 1 Reflections- Chelsea Gose

My first week of GLT went pretty well. My students are really excited for the "how to" genre and are looking forward to writing and publishing their own books. They were really interested in the mentor texts that we read and were able to relate to them in many different ways. The things we focused on this week were: steps of a story (numbering them and using ordinal words), title page, materials page, and a "snappy" introduction. The students had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for their books and planning their steps with a partner. They seem to be struggling a little bit with the steps. Some of them chose topics that are hard to think of several steps for. I've worked with and conferenced with the struggling students, but some of them are still struggling. I am going to try and pull out small groups and work with them in future lessons. This will help me meet their needs so they are able to write a book that they will be proud of. Overall, everything is going really well and I'm using the feedback my MT and FI are giving me to keep improving my lessons!

Me Young Hong #1 reflection

After teaching each lesson, write a Book Club Blog Posting discussing the following:

·         What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson. 

·         What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?

·         What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

·         When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

·         If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?

My lesson went pretty well; it seemed like everyone learned and no one struggled from our first lesson since it was very straight forward lesson. Students were just asked to listen and follow the steps I provided and made a turkey using cookies. They learned about How To genre and how to follow steps; writing was not involved at all and some of reading time was done as a whole group. Hence, everyone was clear with the directions and could follow all the steps. Also, since I demonstrated each step right before they do it, they could follow/ copy my demonstration.

I wrote down the title of the lesson, How to Make a Turkey using Cookies, materials and steps that they can read and follow the steps as they look at my demonstrations. It introduced which steps go inside the How to Genre and how they need to be listed in sequence.

I learned and was actually surprised to see that modeling or demonstration helps them to understand the reading and directions a lot. They could read much better and more accurate after I modeled each step.

There will be no re-teaching for this lesson since it was very clear lesson and there was no student who need additional support struggled. This lesson was done as an introduction of How To genre to students, therefore, it would not affect students even if we do not re-teach them.

I would make steps for each group to look at, hence, I would increase amount of reading time. I thought that we focused too much on making turkeys using cookies and steps I provide, we did not really get to read all the steps; most of the steps was done verbally. Therefore, if I were to teach this same lesson again, I would like to go over all the important steps/ things that go inside How to books with more details; for example, I would emphasize steps, first, next and last, as I read.

Since the lesson was to introduce what my unit plan is going to be about and how we will focus on, I would like to involve more writing and reading for future lessons for us to have professional learning; I would like to observe how students understands the concept of How to books and use their knowledge when making their own How to books..  

Emma Newton Week 1 GLT Reflection

       The first week of my GLT went fairly well I felt.  The children seem to be understanding and learning a lot about retelling stories, but I do feel that they need some practice with sequencing events in stories when retelling, and I plan on doing that this coming week.  When I ask why it is important to retell a story the students always answer, "It is important because it is a way to check for understanding!" this I feel is a result of relating retelling to the "Check for understanding" the students do during Daily 5 when they Read to Someone.  This has made me realize the importance of presenting information to students in a way that will allow them to relate it to prior knowledge.  Additionally,  I have both read a story and had the students retell it and showed a short film for them to retell.  The students loved the short film, and, given that there was not any words in the short film, it really pushed them to pay attention to details and expressions made by the characters.  The short film also sparked the students' attention and drew them in to the lesson- and that was very exciting for me to see!
      I am looking forward to this coming week and working on sequencing with the students.  Although there is some details I would change to the lessons I have done this week, I feel that the students are on the right track to meeting the learning goals I am looking to meet.  

Brown Book club Initial post 4 - Me Young Hong

The big idea of chapter 11 is summarizing and synthesizing lessons using different kinds of strategies. The chapter talks about ways of summarizing information during/ after reading and pulling out the most important information. As an example of “Summarizing the Content and Adding Personal Response,” we summarized a book we read and responded to the story to bring out important take away messages from the text. During my first lesson, we read a book called Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney and summarized verbally how the character describes her room, house, neighbor and country. After summarizing the story, I asked several questions for their responses about the book such as their own room, neighbor and themselves as well. Then, I asked them to draw a map/ picture of their favorite places. By summarizing and synthesizing readings, not only we pulled out the big idea, but also we could connect their own experiences with the readings. Also, as we summarize the story, we were able to make a sequence; we discussed how she ordered her own room, house, neighbor, state and country in sequence. Therefore, I believe that it is very important to summarize our text in order to recollect their readings for our post-assessment and place stories in order.

The big idea of chapter 14 is to read actively with textbooks and teach students to read textbooks. The chapter talks about issues with textbooks, active reading with textbooks and teaching kids to read textbooks which teachers and students may encounter as they cover their textbooks. There might be some obstacles that teachers and students may encounter such as “quality and accuracy of information, clarity of the writing and explanations, amount and accessibility of the information, logical organization on the page and within and across chapters, reasonable use of feathers, fonts, and call-outs and how they explain information and Headings, subheadings, and other signposts that guide the reader through the text.” Then, it talks about how “covering” all parts of our textbook may occur negative effects to students learning. Lastly, it gives different ways of teaching kids to read textbooks such as navigating the format, learning from text and visual features, previewing the chapter. Before we discussed about the chapter, it was very interesting for me to observe how each teacher uses different materials, textbooks or readings and resources from different sources. In Korea, there are certain textbooks that all the same graders use all over the country. Schools distribute textbooks to every student in our country on the first day of school and we only use them for the whole year; teachers may use different worksheets and exams to assess them. Hence, it was very interesting for me to observe how each teacher has very different ways to use different textbooks although they are teaching the same grade.

In our classroom, we use Treasures for first grader book as our textbook and we follow weekly unit in the textbook to do our lessons. However, we do not try to “cover” the whole units since our schedule/ plans change every week. We have been busy following our daily routines since it was their first time to be in two different classroom and switch class from morning to afternoon classroom. Hence, we could not cover all the texts for two weeks, instead, we tried to assist them to be active readers. Among the list of Active Reading with Textbooks, we tried to slow down the rate of reading. We instead of letting them to read all the new vocabulary words and sentences from each unit, we helped them understand the story and pull out the take away messages. We read stories very slowly, we sometimes spent a week to finish and summarize one story. These days, students are engaged to read books at home and in school whenever they have free time. We just started to go to the school library to check-out a book and students take it home to read with their family members. Sometimes, they ask their parents to read it for them or they read it by themselves. We emphasized how reading is important in school and at home. My MT often emphasized importance of reading by saying “you need to read at least one book every day with your parents at home.” Therefore, our classroom focuses on reading texts as much as they can and bring out thoughtful messages using their previous knowledge.

Brown Book Club Initial Post 3- Abbie Sliger

I read chapter 9 of Strategies that Work which focuses on visualizing and inferring in reading. I think both of these topics are very important aspects of reading and should be taught at a young age. The chapter offers a variety of great lesson ideas to implement in a classroom that seem effective and worthwhile.  I think teaching these skills implicitly is important and it seems very simple to do in the book. What we plan on paper can sometimes transform in to something completely different in the classroom. My concern is that these lessons have proof they work, but did they transpire well in the classroom. Both of these topics are vague and require some imagination which I am not sure every student would understand. My question to the group is have you ever seen a lesson on visualization or inferring? If so, what did it look like and how could it be improved? If not, what do you think some ideas to teach these skills would be?