I am in the process of completing my impact project to fulfill my student teaching requirements and to graduate on December 12th, 2010 with a B.S. in Elementary Education!!!  When I have completed it, I will post a file and share it with the world!

Much love.

As a part of my reading methods class at Appalachian State University in the spring of 2010, I was required to create a multi-text study with a group of pre-service teachers.  We based our project on a fourth grade level and we used a series of ten Cinderella stories to base our main study on.  The multi-text study has vocabulary and character trait activities, along with an internet workshop and a few artistic integrations as well.  This multi-text study is well rounded and could be used by any teacher working in the fourth grade.  If you would like to view it please click on the link below.

Cinderella Multi-Text Study

Just FYI. . .I’m going to the BEACH today. . .and I am SO excited!!!

I plan on posting pictures when I get back!!  I hope you all have a beautiful spring break!!

P.S. When you’re bored and surfing the web, click here.  Hehehe.

In the intermediate grades, children often hesitate to state what they truly think the answer is.  However, it is crucial that we as educators ensure that our students have good vocabularies.  Studies show that the less vocabulary a child knows, the harder it will be for them to continue reading on their grade level.  Pronunciation of words may not be the issue for a child, and he/she could just be passed onto the next grade level without a good comprehension of their vocabulary.  In my opinion, a child cannot own a word until they KNOW what it means.  In my case, I can read in German all day long, but I only know a small bit of what any of it means.  Reading it is not the problem, but understanding it is!  This is why we as educators need to ask our students questions like “What do you think that means?” or “Can you give me a definition of that word?”.  Children don’t always like it, but they need to be aware of what the words on the page mean.  It’s for THEIR benefit!

We also need to teach our students strategies that they can use in order to “decode” new words.  Context clues, breaking words down into root words (morphology), and even grabbing a dictionary for a quick definition are all great suggestions for children.  Students with a higher vocabulary usually have greater comprehension, thus when encountering new words, they will be able to decode the word’s meaning quicker.

As you could assume, teaching vocabulary and decoding strategies for new words is a MUST!!! If you want to read more about how vocabulary is incredibly crucial to our students’ academic growth, read this article by clicking here.  You can also click here for a detailed packet on vocabulary instruction in the classroom!

P.S. Please visit my Pirates (Arghh) page, and read the section on Peter and the Starcatchers.  There, I talk about some additional vocabulary building techniques when teaching with great literature!

From the book:                                             What it means to me:

As I have been walking through a 4th grade piratical unit in my upper-elementary grades reading course, I have discovered so many educational classroom approaches that children love.  I know this is true for this piratical unit because it has been tested!  A variety of 4th grade classes at Hardin Park Elementary in Boone, NC have worked through this unit over a period of time, and the feedback along with the learning experiences of these children have been positive!

A double-entry diary (DED) is a way for students to reflect on information found in books, magazines, websites, journals, etc.  In one column, students record information they find within their text, and in the second column, they write about how it makes them feel, or what they think the information means.  In this way, students retain information better because they are able to write it down, along with their opinions and inferences about it, thus making the information more meaningful to them. The idea for using a DED in this piratical unit is for students to collect important information about pirates by reading the following books: What If You Met a Pirate? (Jan Adkins) and Pirate Diary-The Journal of Jake Carpenter (Richard Platt).

I really enjoyed reading the first book (What If You Met a Pirate?).  It was so much more interesting than reading a boring text book.  This book had beautiful illustrations, labels pointing to pirate gear and accessories, maps, and timelines!  It was very interesting and meaningful to me as I read through it!  The second book (Pirate Diary-The Journal of Jake Carpenter) was awesome too!  It gave a pirate’s perspective of being at sea and living day to day as a pirate through a diary-type of text.  When children view this, they will already be thinking about diaries and how they are written.  This should help in introducing the DED idea to students and they WILL benefit from this type of research!  If you would like to read more on DEDs and how it was implemented in the 4th grade classes, please click here, and read this article for yourself!

Yo Ho Ho!

But wait; doesn’t each poet do that already when they write a poem?  Doesn’t it come from within them?

The answer is yes.  However, the way they interpret their poem is all their own.  When poetry is composed in the classroom as a way to reflect on certain knowledge, a famous person in history, or individual character, it is often called “I Poetry”.  The poet usually writes as if he or she is describing him/herself or another person.  This type of poetry allows for students to get creative and think deeply on what they recognize within themselves, or someone else.  These poems are always written in the first person, giving the poet a chance to be innovative in how they choose to reveal their understanding of a character, a historical figure, or themselves.

I have written an “I Poem” in the spirit of Blackbeard!  He was a notorious pirate from the 1700s, and children would love to write poems inspired by his typical piratical nature.  You can check it out on my Pirates (Arghh) page, or just click here.  You will find a link on this page where you can hear me recite this poem as well!

Because I enjoyed writing the piratical “I Poem”, I wrote one about myself as well.  You can find it here on my poetry page.  You will also find another link on this page where you can hear me recite this poem as well!

To learn more about “I Poetry”, open this powerpoint and save it for yourself!

I Poetry (Developed by Beth Frye, Katie Blackburn, and Kelley Wilson)

Second of all, this article speaks VOLUMES!  We as educators (and future educators) know that in order to give the best education possible to our students, we have to get on their level of learning.  It will do our students no good if we simply teach the ONE way we want to, all day, every day.  Though our ways of teaching will reach most of our average level students, the few exceptional children we are bound to have in our classrooms will either struggle, or grow bored of our routine.  The lack of accommodation in a classroom is like blowing air into a busted balloon; without proper accommodations, improvement will be a lot less likely to happen in students that have exceptionalities.

But HOW can we as educators teach our students the same material if we accommodate?

First, we need to conduct assessments among all of our students at the beginning, the middle, and the ending of each school year.  This way, we can examine academic growth, and properly judge the instructional level each student is on throughout the course of the year.   After this is completed at the beginning of the school year, we can accurately assign reading material to our students that would not only be relevant to the curriculum, but also relevant to their individual instructional-levels.  Assigned reading material should never be easy for the student; it should be challenging enough to spark interest, but easy enough for the student to read silently.

This article mainly focused on using social studies trade books in place of text books, when accommodating for struggling readers.  I agree with this approach, but I think if we as educators can get as far away from text books as possible with ALL of our students, the better learning experience our students will have.  I will be honest; I don’t remember anything memorable from upper elementary social studies, because the name of the game was to read the section as fast as you could, answer the stupid questions at the end, then maybe we could go outside early and play.  We never read fun books with significant information about what we were studying; THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME.

I hope as an educator, I can live up to my teaching standards!  I know it’s difficult to accomplish superb teaching skills when we have our hands tied with so many other responsibilities, but I know it’s worth it for the students in the end.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be some child’s favorite teacher one day.  If that’s all I ever accomplish as a teacher, then I would be satisfied!

There is no doubt in my mind that shared reading ought to be implemented into the daily lesson plans of elementary teachers; especially in the primary grades.  These are the years that children really need to be exposed to entertaining and educational literature in the classroom, so that they will hopefully enjoy reading as they grow older.  Shared reading helps children to comprehend the meaning of stories and passages, and it also seems to boost their confidence in reading aloud in class as their reading skills improve.

As these educators had different answers as to why shared reading is important and how it should be implemented in the classroom, I found that the authors of the two piratical readings I just finished had some differing information and opinions on the life of Blackbeard as well.  While researching the life of Blackbeard on the National Geographic website for Kids, and after reading the Not-So-Jolly Roger, the information on Blackbeard varied between the two sources.  Some of the information collided, while some of it coincided perfectly.  I think it is very important that we as educators should make it clear that while researching a topic, not all of the correct information can be found via one single source.  If you think about it, you really just need to break the word “research” down.  Re-, meaning to perform a task more than once, and -Search, meaning to look for something.  Explaining this breakdown may help students to better understand the meaning and importance of research, and why multiple sources need to be used to find the correct answers to their questions.