April’s Teaching Blog

I speak a little Spanish.  I speak enough to get me by, and I really like the fact that I can communicate with my students and parents that speak Spanish.  I understand Spanish speaking children and their parents wanting to learn English.  And the best part is… its possible to speak more than one language!  It is totally possible for kids to speak one language at home, and then to use another mainly at school.  I think that they can not only do it, but they are smarter for it.  Goooooo bilingual!

The video was cool, it was kind of like seeing theory in practice.  I like how they stressed honoring home language.  I’m probably going to say something a little unpopular, but I DEFINITLEY agree with honoring home language.  I’d like to think that we are honoring school language too, in all types.  I’m all about the balance, y’all. 

The book is great about giving real examples of how to implement practice, so I toast to you, Barone, Mallette and Xu, for your wonderful graphs, lists, examples, and research.  It really stood out to me when the authors pointed out that in English we use so many different sentence structures, an ELL student would have a hard time extracting the meaning from these sentences.  Share time was always hard for my ELL students, and I liked the ideas that BMX (my acronym for Barone, Mallette, and Xu) put forth about encouraging participation. 

SO WEIRD!  I was looking for an article about emergent literacy and disability for class today, and my goodness, but up popped an article by my professor at Appalachian State!  I always knew Dr. Koppenhaver was a smart man.  I am particularly interested in autism and emergent literacy, and Dr. Koppenhaver has written a slew of articles on this topic!  Who knew?!?!  This particular article studied nonspeaking preschoolers with autism, and discussed motivating academic, linguistic, and social interactions aid interventions with these children.  It includes a list of successful approaches to increase these motivations.  Dr. Koppenhaver designed a study to see the results of implementing these interventions, studying “autistic labeled” 4-year-olds.  His results found that all of the children demonstrated measurable and observable gains in the understanding a use of print.  Although it was a short study, he really made a case for his research, and he really did keep it short and sweet.  Great article, great professor.  Definitley a must read for those who have children with autism in their classrooms.

And on to the required reading…It is interesting to me how this article really integrates what is being taught in my Child Development and Disability course.  Things that I took away from the article:

1.  What a great way to have visually impaired children interact with text… act it out!  Use props!  These strategies work for both sighted and non-sighted children.  Since these children cannot see the illustrations, they must be put in some tangible and tactile form for them to understand the concepts.  Woop woop to Wendy, Pat, and Nancy (pseudonyms, duh)!

2.  I really liked the alphabet braille boxes where the children read the first letter in braille and then there were objects for them to feel that began with that letter.  This is great for sighted children as well. 

3.  I thought it was interesting that visually impaired children were exposed to braille as early as possible, seeing as how we are so concerned with developmentally appropriate practices with sighted children.  We are concerned with a classroom of 3-year -olds that have the alphabet displayed in the classroom, but these visually impaired children are learning their version of the alphabet ASAP.  I personally don’t have a problem with exposing babies to letters, I talk about letters with my 8-month-old.  Call me developmentally inappropriate, I’m inappropriate anyways.

4.  Let’s expose sighted kids to braille and talk to our sighted students about children who are visually impaired.  We talk about different cultures and expose children to their customs, we talk about different religions and celebrations, lets talk about visually impaired children and what they have to do in order to learn and function. 

Good articles, good examples of strategies, I give it 1.5 thumbs up.

record, that is.  Personally, I enjoy running records.  They are a pretty quick way to see where your kids are with their decoding skills, comprehension, etc.  Although, I hear that once they move into first and second grade, it is a much more involved process to do a running record on a child.  Apparently, you have to time their reading, and obviously, they read longer books.  In my school last year, the first grade teachers spent a LOT of time doing running records.  But no siree, not in my kindergarten.  They were quick, and you can give them under the pretense that “Oh, Nicole, can you come read this story to me?”  My kids loved reading to me, so this was pretty routine. 

My only problem is this:

In many school systems, running records are administered using preprinted running record sheets that contain the exact text the student is reading in a matching leveled book. To allow a teacher to administer multiple assessments with a single student, two or three books at the same reading level may be provided in a kind of kit.

A concern with these kits is that the reliance on such materials can lead to an assumption that teachers need not (or are not permitted to) stray from the boxed kit in order to fully assess children’s reading skills. Authentic opportunities to assess students may then be lost due to the constraints of the testing kit.

from learnnc.org

I agree that it would be so wonderful to do assessments in informal places during centers.  In the school system I was in, we had DRA kits, and a level 2 had to be mastered in order to pass from kindergarten to first grade.  My principal, I’m sure, would have been pretty ticked off if I decided to use a book that was not in the DRA, because how could I POSSIBLY know if this child was ready for first grade if I didn’t use the standardized DRA books?  In order to leave my classroom on the last day of teacher workdays in June, I HAD to have each child’s DRA level written and graphed to pass to their first grade teacher for the next year.  It was important that all these children had been tested on the same book.  Now don’t get me wrong, I see that these books are designed to target specific skills that build upon one another and progress throughout the DRA.  But I think it would be nice to be trusted that I, as a college graduate in Elementary Education, have the competency to know if 2 books are comparable and able to assess a child’s reading ability. 

I like running records, just not the bureaucracy that sometimes goes along with it.

I’ve waited until the very last possible moment to post a blog, the time is now 2:17 pm, and after a day of admiring snow, I guess that I’ll get down to business.

Repeated readings = duh.  Just like anything else in kindergarten, it must be repeated time and time again for it to stick to their little long-term memories.  You have to sing the same songs over and over, play in the same free choice centers, count everyday, face it.  Kindergartners are creatures of habit, and this is a GOOD thing.  Biologically, being creatures of habit probably helps them learn.  Repetition and modeling, 2 keys of good kindergarten learning.  I love to model my thinking!  The kids love when I think out loud, they love to help me think through the problems I encounter throughout the day (writing, reading, math), and even though it may seem silly sometimes, how would they know how to do it if someone hadn’t explained it to them and shown them the correct way to think?  As teachers, we need things modeled for us (think student teaching) and the kids need things modeled for them to become critical thinkers and “good” readers. 

The Case for Informational Text…good read.  Sometimes I don’t always think about how important it is for young children to be exposed to informational text.  Working with thematic units has really helped with this, though.  Lets say that for a field trip we are going to a farm.  Our unit for that week will be “The Farm”.  We will read fictional stories about farmers and animals, we read informational text to learn facts about these animals, and then this theme is also incorporated in other activities and centers around the room.  I’ve never read research on “thematic units” but I swear, they work for me, and they really lend themselves to informational text.  Not to get all “sexist”, but little boys heart informational text.  It’s true.  If its about garbage collectors, snakes, etc., the boys are going to love it.  Maybe the male mind just thinks more concretely and they want to know about “real” information, not made up stories.  Now I don’t mean that all boys are this and all girls are that, but there are definitely gender differences, in my opinion.  And most boys like books about trucks. What a novel way to get kids excited about reading!  Give them something they are interested in! 

Reader’s Theater is a wonderful tool for developing fluency in upper elementary kids.  I am personally a big fan, but I’ve never really thought to attempt to develop reader’s theaters for kindergartners. When I was student teaching, my class did a Reader’s Theater for family night, but it was just the kids memorizing lines so all the parents would be impressed.  Most of them weren’t reading, and overall, a big fat waste of time.  We did the Hungry Caterpillarby Eric Carle (a suggested story to use in the article), but the kids memorized the book in small pieces, rather then doing the developmentally appropriate activity suggested:  Have the children feed the caterpillar as they read.  Its all about modification I suppose.  Kids love acting and moving, therefore, I love to use it in my little classroom nest of emerging readers.