Week 11

A:  I feel like the best approaches for assessing the three components of fluency (accuracy, reading speed, and prosody) are running records, fluency checks, and informal reading inventories, There were on page 85 of the Tompkins reading and along side it there was the recommended grade level for each assessments.  Running records help to calculate the percentage of words the student reads correctly and from this you can analyze any errors made.  After the student reads out loud and the teacher makes marks on her copy of the story, you can identify if the material was too easy, to hard, or appropriate for the student. There are also ways for the teacher to categorize any mistakes the student made by asking specific questions listed on page 86. Although running records are the most useful, teachers can also use IRI’s.  There are two parts to this test: graded word lists and passages. The students read the words until it is too difficult for the, which helps the teacher to figure out where the student should begin with the passage. After completing the passage the students need to answer questions. To test fluency, it is necessary to have the students read out loud. I believe the students’ word identification is more developed than from when I started, so it’s developing well.  Each student has received word rings with specific sight words. They are tested on these sight words from week to week and when they can correctly identify each word they move up to the next color level. Majority of the students have increased a lot from the beginning of the school year and some have passed all of the sight words for 1^st grade already. Some students still have trouble with things like short/long vowels, magic letters, or words that don’t follow the same patterns as others. As for fluency, many of the students have increased in that as well, but sometimes I think the students just have the books memorized because they have read them so many times. However, once my CT feels its time for them to move on to a higher level, they are once again challenged but I believe most of the students fluency has increased. Many students have a better word recognition now than they did at the beginning of the school year so they can get through reading more fluently. As for my focus student, she transferred to the school so I don’t know where she was at before she came to our class, but she is at an appropriate level for her age and seems to do well when not distracted.

B: My book, Number the Stars, is at too high of a level for my placement classroom. I think for this book, I would focus on comprehension. “Some comprehension strategies can be important to a reader because they have the potential to provide access to knowledge that is removed from personal experience (Stahl).” Although I don’t believe that this book will directly relate to the students, I think that some situations they are in could possibly trigger something that has happened in their life that was similar to something in the book.

I would read a chapter to the class each day, and then have the students create a story map about what happened. The story map was talked about in the Stahl reading and the students seemed to do well with this. I would also meet with the students individually and see if they could retell the story. It might be better to read a few chapters at a time to separate groups of students at different times of the day and have the complete the map and retell directly after instead of trying to assess the entire class at once.  If I had an older group of kids (higher el) I would begin with guided practice, then have them create/use a story map to guide their learning and retell. I would also do reciprocal teaching, where students take turns leading discussion and asking questions. I would do this in small groups.

NEW LITERACIES PROJECT REFLECTION

My conceptual understanding of literacy has changed quite a bit since starting this project. Initially, I used to only think of literacy in the sense of a subject, like language arts. While reading and writing are a part of almost everything humans do, most people just associate the formal context of literacy to a subject in school and then do not give it much more thought than that. I never thought of the different kinds of literacies there are, and am actually kind of glad that we did this project so that they all came to light. I have looked through a lot of everyone else’s projects, and it is incredible the amount of information we generated as a class. As a future educator, I think it is so important to not only be aware of multiple ways/strategies to teach topics, but to expose your students to what they can do with technology, like we just did in our projects.

I will be the first to admit that language arts is my least favorite subject. I was always good at it, I just found it so painstakingly boring and monotonous. Doing my project on the prezi, however, was surprisingly enjoyable and I actually took my time and added in a lot of extras because I liked doing it. I plan on doing activities like that with my students so that they don’t make the same associations with language arts that I did throughout school. There are so many ways to be creative and make tasks fun to do, and I fully intend on maximizing on that in the future!

Since starting this project, I have definitely grown in my understanding of literacy. Like previously stated, I just breezed by the definition with ‘the ability to read and write’ and left it at that. After completing my project on visual literacy (and viewing other projects), it is clear to me that literacy is much more than just words. Images, emotions, cultures, and all kinds of other aspects are involved and are important for students to grasp. Literacy is so much more than just reading and writing, and there are so many cool technologies out there to explore and utilize!

Providing effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means providing students with multiple strategies and venues to engage their learning. This means that you need to teach them from many different types of literacies as do so with different technologies. Students can learn about cultures, photography (or any image), and emotions by doing various projects with blogs, e-scrapbooking, digital storyboards, online presentations, and all sorts of interactive media. Doing so not only teaches them the different aspects of a subject, but it also allows them to be creative and use more of their skills than they would if they were just reading a book or doing yet another worksheet on nouns.

I definitely see myself using the different technologies we explored in this project in my classroom. I loved making my prezi, and I think a lot of other students would also enjoy it. Similarly, a lot of students can benefit from doing projects like this just simply for a break from the usual monotony of their school day. In order to do this, I would need to spend more time on the different technologies so that I could master them so that I could help my students in the case of an issue. Other than that, the only thing needed is a lot of patience!

To teach emotional literacy, you could start out the lesson by talking about different emotions and what you do when you are feeling those emotions. From there, you could look at pictures (or read a book) and discuss how the characters may be feeling at specific times. You could draw on prior experiences and ask a child about a situation that made them feel a certain emotion. To extend that, you could have them make a prezi that depicts a bunch of different scenarios of a certain emotion, or a collage of people who appear to be experiencing the same emotion (or an array of different ones). This uses the technology as an aid in the lesson, but does not overpower what the students should be getting out of the lesson. Similarly, prezi could be used to keep the students’ attention if the teacher presents part of their lesson using the program. This could be a good strategy for holding older students’ attention for longer or more monotonous lessons. It also gets the students involved if you have them do it, and it is very interactive which also keeps them engaged. It is fairly simple to run, so it does not take away from the point of the lesson.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project (surprisingly) and I will for sure be using prezi again! I also look forward to using visual literacy in my lesson plans!

New Literacies Blog

Emotional literacy:
I chose to do emotional literacy because I feel that this is a very important concept in the younger years. I think that children need to learn and understand their emotions. One of the first definitions I came across was, "They are important, because they address mankind's most fundamental problems of violence, crime, abuse, addiction, prejudice, racism and dysfunctional families (http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/index.shtml)." These are important issues that children may be going through and are not sure how to handle. Another definition I found is, "The ability to express feelings with specific feeling words, in 3 word sentences.  For example, "I feel rejected (http://eqi.org/elit.htm)." I think this is very important for children, especially younger children. This helps children put their emotions into words and help deal with what they are going to and speak to one another about issues they are facing.  The definition that I felt combined both of these definitions into one is, "EMOTIONAL LITERACY is the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our emotions. Just as verbal literacy is the basic building-block for reading and writing, emotional literacy is the basis for perceiving and communicating emotions. Becoming emotionally literate is learning the alphabet, grammar and vocabulary of our emotional lives (http://www.feel.org/emotional_literacy.php)." I liked that this definition states that it is the ability to recognize, understand, and express emotions. I think that these are the most important concepts in emotional literacy. Joel- I know you have children. Do you think these are important concepts that your children should learn about at a young age?  The traditional literacies of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing all come in to play in emotional literacy.  You read about it, then talk about it and listen to others talk about it. You can also write about your feelings and emotions or create a story that involves emotional literacy. You can view it just by participating in all of these concepts. I think that if my students were exploring emotional literacy they would need support from their teachers as well as families and school employees to talk about different emotions, attitudes, and situations. They would need to read stories with a variety of emotions in them and be able to feel comfortable in their environment to discuss these emotions and see if they can relate to them.  I think that this literacy is already present in the curriculum through various books that they read, however, I don't think that there is much discussion about the emotions in the books so they never fully understand emotional literacy.

Photos:
I chose photos because this is one of the technologies that I haven't worked with. I have been playing around with Photobucket and I really like it.  Some different things I have learned about it are that you can upload different photos and create an album, or multiple albums. These can be titled, and each individual photo can have a caption. These photos can also be tagged. I'm not sure if this relates to Facebook tags or not, I haven't tried it. However, there is an option to post the picture or album on to Facebook, or to post a comment on the album from Facebook. You can also share it through email and other options. The pictures can be edited.  You can choose a background theme for the album/webpage. There are different links as well for when you post or send a picture or album. I am using writing and viewing in a different way when using this technology. This is because I use writing to create a title and caption.  I view the picture in a way that is different than I normally would. I normally would just look at the picture and think about what I like/don't like about the picture, but when I view it for Photobucket I think about what the viewer would see and what I should write in the caption/title for the viewer to understand what is going on in the picture or why it is important. I think that this could be a good way to teach about some basic emotional literacy.  You could use pictures and have the students create the captions involving emotions that they believe are being felt in the picture. It could be difficult with some emotions, but others would be easy to portray.  You could also represent situations like wedding, funerals, new babies, and see if any of the kids can relate to what is going on in the picture to bring out bigger subjects such as a death in the family, parents getting remarried, or a new sibling. We could enter captions on the spot after agreeing on one as a class for each picture.  However, most people don't read long captions because the point of a caption is to summarize the picture and it can be difficult to keep it short even though there can be so much to say.  My students would have to understand how to summarize a picture and look at it to figure out emotions in the picture.  I could incorporate that in the language arts curriculum and instruction by teaching about different ways to write things, as in summarizing and captions, and also being a "good reader" and thinking about emotions while reading.  It's a really neat site and I recommended it!