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The need to participate and understand are human needs that live within all of us. When teachers and schools intentionally provide classroom opportunities which work to fulfill these needs, they help those students to build relationships towards learning. Triplett (2007 ) stated that "Building students' confidence with positive student-teacher and student-student relationships enables engagement and feelings of self-worth "(as cited in Gambrell & Morrow, 2015, p.114). Purposeful work which incorporates our students interests, culture, home language and background knowledge, keeps our students engaged in the learning.
Classroom dialog also plays an important role as we aim to have all of our students develop understanding and deep thinking. The Common Core State Standards "identify oral language as a significant proficiency that merits attention in all of the disciplines in which we expect students to apply literacy practices" (Horowitz as cited in Pearson & Hiebert, 2015, p.57) The focus of oral language into all of the Common Core subject areas, point to it's importance. Through oral language, relationships between content and learner are formed and concepts become reinforced,clarified, extended and internalized, which is particularly important for ELL and minority students, as we aim to close the achievement gap.
The need to participate and understand are human needs that live within all of us. When teachers and schools intentionally provide classroom opportunities which work to fulfill these needs, they help those students to build relationships towards learning. Triplett (2007 ) stated that "Building students' confidence with positive student-teacher and student-student relationships enables engagement and feelings of self-worth "(as cited in Gambrell & Morrow, 2015, p.114). Purposeful work which incorporates our students interests, culture, home language and background knowledge, keeps our students engaged in the learning.
Classroom dialog also plays an important role as we aim to have all of our students develop understanding and deep thinking. The Common Core State Standards "identify oral language as a significant proficiency that merits attention in all of the disciplines in which we expect students to apply literacy practices" (Horowitz as cited in Pearson & Hiebert, 2015, p.57) The focus of oral language into all of the Common Core subject areas, point to it's importance. Through oral language, relationships between content and learner are formed and concepts become reinforced,clarified, extended and internalized, which is particularly important for ELL and minority students, as we aim to close the achievement gap.
Purposeful work connecting the home and school
This is an example of a project that I did for course ECI 509 - After reading Reading and Writing Genre with Purpose (Duke, Caughlan, Juzwik & Martin, 2012), I worked with my kindergarten students and their families to create bilingual books which the students could then display in the classroom to teach English speakers Spanish. My students loved this activity and I have started using it in my Spanish after school literacy class; in this case, I have the students write both the Spanish and English and then take their books home to teach their parents English. |
Above is the letter that went home to parents explaining the book making project.
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As a teacher working primarily with students learning English as a second language I am keenly aware of how the affective filter (Krashen, )impedes their ability to learn in the classroom. Can this limiting factor, which we associate with language learning, be impeding the literacy learning in more than just our ELL's? In the paper below I examine this theory as it concerns reading acquisition and point out practices to help both students and families feel more at ease in our classrooms and within the educational system.
As part of our practicum course in this program, I worked with a partner to tutor a fourth grade student. In order to design tutoring sessions to improve his areas of needs, my partner and I used a battery of assessments and reading passages from the Analytical Reading Inventory (Woods & Moe, 2015) Based on these assessments, we determined that fluency and comprehension were some of the areas where our student needed the most support. Through some get-to-know you games and attitude of reading surveys, we found out that our student was very interested in marine life. As a result, we designed our tutoring sessions around this interest of his. This experience helped me to recognize the benefits of incorporating topics of student interest into the classroom reading materials. Through the use of the Reciprocal Teaching model, I also experienced the powerful effects of this strategy on my student's comprehension.
Below is a Power Point that my partner and I made to support our students comprehension and growth of vocabulary for the material he was reading in our sessions.
vocab_for_during_lessons.pptx | |
File Size: | 7662 kb |
File Type: | pptx |