End of Semester Reflection

   When thinking about the semester in it's entirety,  I feel as though I have learned a lot about how I should and will teach Language Arts. I have always had a good grasp on L.A. related things but throughout the semester, I have realized there are so many parts to learning about these different things. I have learned more about the importance of scaffolding when teaching Language Arts and how important differentiated instruction is. It is difficult when we, as teachers, already know all of these things and we need to be aware of the fact that our students are still building the foundational knowledge needed to become successful language arts learners.
     I have also learned more about incorporating technology into my classroom in regards to language arts. Through doing the New Literacy Project, I learned about the many different kinds of literacy there are and how to use different technologies to teach about those literacies. In doing this project, I learned more about how easy it can be to incorporate these different things into language arts instruction and how it can be beneficial to students.
    Overall, I am really pleased with what I have learned in this course about teaching language arts. I feel more prepared, especially after having written multiple lesson plans. I obviously have much more to learn, but I am pleased with the progress I have made this semester!

Letter to Parents

April 13, 2013

Augustus & Marlene Breckenshaw

5555 Tree Lane

West Lansing MI 00000

Mr. & Mrs. Augustus Breckenshaw,

                I have had the pleasure of working with your son Martin for the past year and have learned a great deal about what he values, his hobbies, and what he wants to be when he grows up. Martin excels in generating ideas as well as spending time with literature that supports adventure and animals. I am grateful for such a fun student to have in my class!

                I will be finishing up my teaching internship this May, whereby I will no longer be attending the classroom, and Martin’s teacher, Mrs. Coledemere will take over instruction once again. Until we reach that point and into the summer, I encourage you to actively pursue the integration of reading activities into your daily lives. Although Martin has made tremendous strides in learning the many blends of the alphabet, recognizing sight words, and understanding the use of vowels in words, extra practice is always helpful. Martin struggles to recognize new, and more difficult words, as well as incorporating these words into the text he is reading. Martin can comprehend what he needs to, but when a word stumps him, he is stuck and spends a great deal of time focusing on the word instead of remembering all that he has previously read. Your child is reading at grade level, but I encourage you to challenge him this summer as simple literary practice techniques can make a world of difference/.

There are many ways you can go about challenging Martin’s current literary standing. As I stated above, Martin enjoys reading books that pertain to his interests. In pedagogical terms, we call this library, where Martin delves into an assortment of books while also venturing deeper into the classics he loves the most. Martin would be a prime candidate for reading clubs that the local library offers, as it exposes him to a wide variety of books. In addition, I would utilize the index cards I will attach to this, which have letters and blends on them, to make words. If you are able to make an affix and then have Martin build off of it, this challenges him to make the word instead of reading a pre-created one. This reverses the role of what Martin is responsible for, which allows for some differentiation in activities, hopefully keeping him interested.

The final and most important thing I can ask you to do is to read with Martin. Rely heavily on asking Martin to do the reading even if it is a long and daunting text. Remind him to take each line as its own and before he knows it the page will be done! The more text Martin is exposed to, the more equipped he will be with sorting through hard and challenging words. When you do encounter challenging words in a text, bring them out in your everyday life or in the making words activity in order to foster the opportunity for a difficult word to become a sight word.

You have a good boy on your hands and I am sad to see him head up to second grade without me. He does well and you should be proud. Challenge him now as he is young and with time, you will see the fruits of your labor. Enjoy your summer!

Thank you,

Miss Cramer

Reading Lesson Overview

For my reading lessons, I am planning on focusing on some skills I know my students will understand how to use, but may not be fully developed yet. The students I plan to work with are of varying levels of reading proficiency. I would like to work with one student (student 1) that I know struggles with reading but enjoys it and the other student (student 2) is a great reader but is not the most confident. Student 1 is a confident young man who does decently well in school but does all that he can to avoid schoolwork. I have noticed that he sometimes spends all of math time in the bathroom. When it comes to reading, he knows his sight words well, but has a really hard time with larger words with strange sounds in them. He will attempt a word and then while not looking at the word itself, he will make random guesses as to what the word is. Student 2 is a good student but is pretty constantly distracted and doesn’t focus well. This has affected her reading because she does not focus well when she is reading and she tends to have pretty poor fluency, although she does know the words she is reading.

            Because these students are different, it is hard to figure out what lessons would be beneficial to both of them. From what I have seen, my students do not spend a lot of time working with vocabulary besides the use of dictionaries. For this reason, I would like to do more of a vocab lesson using a strategy similar to that used in Winters article with word frames. I would read a short book with my students and choose one word from that book to analyze. I think choosing a word that my students are unfamiliar with and conducting the word frame as well as doing some word associations with a bubble map would be helpful to them to think of new words in a different way. This is something I think both of my students are capable of and would help with their fluency. We can also break down the phonemes of that specific word to help Student 1 learn more about how to break down a word.

            For my other reading lesson, I am thinking of working on reading factors with my students. Because they both enjoy reading, but it may not be the easiest thing for them, I think working on things like predicting, connecting, questioning, visualizing, etc, will continue to excite them about reading and help them develop some reading strategies that will help them in the future. So, for this lesson, I will choose either another book or the same book used for the vocabulary lesson and work through the book, pausing to make predications, connections, visualizations, etc to encourage them to do this while reading on their own. I will try to explain the importance of all of these strategies to their learning as well.  Again, I think this would be beneficial to both of my students because these are things they can both work on even though they are at different reading levels.