Connections in the Classroom - Literacy across content

Connections in the Classroom - Literacy across content

This past week I've been working with students on increasing their reading comprehension and studying skills not just in their ELA class, but in all of their content courses.  I was told by many of the teachers that the students have been having difficultly really grasping what they are reading in class.  So each morning, my co-student teacher and I have been working on helping students improve their reading skills with different studying skills.

We've been teaching them strategies such as graphic organizers, note-taking, sticky notes, and highlighting ideas and knowledge that they need to know when they are reading.  A lot of the students have taken more of a liking to high lighting.  To me, this was relate-able because during my own grade school years, my teachers encouraged my peers and I to write in our books and to constantly make notes and highlight.  When I was in my AP Lit class, my books were practically color coded.  However, this helped me comprehend novels and what i was reading better so I applied to to ALL of my content courses. 

So this week, I've been encouraging my students to use highlighters and other comprehension skills to help them understand all of their content courses. 

Also, I had the science teacher approach me and ask if I was going to be teaching dialogue in the next week.  She's in luck that I am, because she wants to collaborate with me and use dialogue in one of her science projects.  Therefore, it will be interesting to see what goes on in the next few weeks and how the students will improve in their content courses besides ELA. 

Learning Station Success

Throughout this week in my first placement, I am happy to say that a lot of our activities have greatly reflected everything we have been reading about in class lately.

This week we changed up the system in my host teacher's class and decided to start teaching the students using learning stations. We split up the class and have the students rotate from their social studies student teacher, to reading with me, and then to Mr. Smith and his performance task station.  The students have all said that they LOVE the idea of the learning stations.  They love the idea of how they get more individualized time and they feel like they are learning more effectively.

I've honestly never seen my students so motivated before and I think it's because they have the chance to just spend time with the teacher individually and get to express their opinions without the fear of talking in a big group.  They hate having to speak in front of one another in a larger group, but love the idea of talking amongst their groups at the stations.

This week we've been focusing on the idea of making connections in readings and so far the students have really been able to catch on.  It's been amazing the ideas and connections that they are coming up with and how they are connecting the book to things that they have read or seen lately.  Sometimes I wonder who replaced my students and put these eager learners in their place!

I think my biggest questions now though are:  since we have found out what the students like and how they learn best and are motivated - how do we keep this up?  What are some ways to keep them motivated and to "spice" up the learning stations?

Reading Timeline Ramblings and Reflections

Reflections on my literacy timeline...

I didn't really realize that I had much of a literacy timeline until we were asked to write one in class.  I started reading when I was around four years old.  My mother actually has cassette tapes of me practicing my reading that I found.  I started off with the little Disney Golden Books (haha so that's where my love for Disney started...) and I can remember my dad reading me the "Little Critter" books every night.  He would read them to me and then I remember later on trying to learn how to read them on my own.

When I hit the first grade, my mom started buying me more Disney books because that seemed to be all I wanted to read.  This is where chapter books came in.  Disney made a collection of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin books that were divided into chapters.  So I would spend hours reading those and I really enjoyed the pictures if I'm being honest.  Once I moved on from there, I picked up on the Boxcar Children.

Now I was never one for The BabySitter's Club or the Nancy Drew series and I loathed the American Girl series.  The only girly books that I even came close to reading was the series known as "The Pony Pal Club."  I used to read one of those books in a single four hour sitting.  I lived vicariously through these girls who all had horses because I knew that I would never own one myself (hence why my My Little Pony collection was quite extensive.)

When I hit the third grade, I fell in love with Beverely Cleary and read all of her Ramona books and my personal favorite, Socks.  This was quite the norm until I moved up to Mary Downing Hahn's books in the fourth grade.  She wrote the book "Wait Till Helen Comes" which to this day is still my favorite book from my childhood.  I even have an old library hardback copy that I sought after on Amazon.  If I had to start children or students off with a good ghost story, this would definitely be the winner.

As I moved onto Middle School however, I grew out of the chapter book phase except for the occasional reading of Jurassic Park or The Lost World.  At this point I grew more manga and graphic novels at this age.  I spent probably more time reading manga books such as Inuyasha or Sailor Moon than I did my own books for class.  But I was also prohibited to buy my own manga books (my parents were very much against anime) so I had to suffice with what I could find in the library.  Needless to say that by the time I was allowed to buy these books, Sailor Moon was no longer in print and my taste for manga books declined dramatically.  I didn't pick them up until late high school again.

High school, I will say, was the best years of my reading timeline.  I read more books than I could count.  I not only kept up with my own textbooks for class such as Fahrenheit 451 and Of Mice and Men, but I was also the book reviewer for my newspaper for two years.  So I made sure to read my own book every month that I could write a report on.  It was here that I spent most of my afternoons reading novels by Ted Dekker (the Stephen King of Christian fiction) and Frank Peretti.  I also started reading Harry Potter when I started my freshmen year (I was a late bloomer into the Potter series and read the first three books in my freshmen year.) Top this off with an occasional manga and that pretty much summed up my reading list until I started AP Literature in my senior year.  That experience deserves a whole blog on it's own, but I can honestly say it was probably the most influential year on my reading territories so far in my life.

So today, I hate to say it, but I find it hard to make time to read lately. I have so many books that are screaming to be read again, but for some reason, being forced to read all of these useless articles and chapters in nonsense textbooks in college drained my passion for reading.  I felt that most of the books in my literature classes her at GCSU were not carefully selected.  I read a few good ones here and there, but for the most part, I couldn't stand a lot of the books that I was forced to read.  I don't remember half of them which should tell you how much of an impact they made on me.  I can remember three that I was forced to read.  My senior year gave me a bit of leway with being allowed to choose my ten books for my capstone (where I discovered S.E. Hinton) but it still wasn't enough to ignite a spark for a passion to read again.

I think my biggest concept for me when I become a teacher is to really take into account what my students are interested in these days.  I plan to have a selection of books ready with summaries and have the class take a vote on which ones they would prefer to read or might have more of an interest in reading.  I feel that this way, the students feel that they at least get a choice in what they are going to read.  I had a teacher in college do this with us and it was very helpful.  We ended up reading excerpts from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" instead of a nonfiction book and the discussions in class were extremely insightful.

I feel that if you are going to try and give students a passion for reading, then let them have a voice in what they want to read.  Before you even decide to pick books, have students tell you what kind of things they are interested in.  Then make your decisions on what books you will teach.  There are so many books out there that can match curriculum AND be entertaining for students.  It just takes a little bit of time and the effort of getting to know your students I think...I know that if my teachers had used this tactic, perhaps my burning passion for reading wouldn't have been so smoldered by the useless calamity of boring texts that were shoved into my face and drained my wallet for four years of my education.