How People Learn

How do you teach students to be life long learners?  I find myself often wondering how many of my students have hidden talents.  I know that the "traditional" classroom and learning environment isn't the best fit for most of the students we serve.  That's why we have been innovative in creating outdoor education opportunities, service-learning and committing to the arts.  I think about Bill Gates who didn't finish school yet went on to become a major success.  I wonder how many times we stress doing well academically in school, when in the end, it may be a limiting factor in how to measure our students knowledge, success and ideas.

I was a little surprised that the data showed that students only spend 14% of their time in school.  I would've said they spent 1/2 their time in school and the other half at home.  I believe in community building and look to finding more ways to connect the two.  Then I wonder how much of what the students learn at school, really gets taken home, applied or shared with their families and communities because of what is really going on at home.  There are so many other things students are surrounded by when the leave school.  What then becomes important and how do you bridge that gap?

How People Learn

When and where have you experienced learning experiences or activities like this, where you were so absorbed in what you were doing, you needed no extrinsic motivation to continue? When do you feel most alive and interested in what you are doing?

There are a few different things that I can think of that I do and feel most alive.  I feel most alive when I am working on arts and crafts, trying to find a new discovery or playing sports.  Something all these activities have in common is that they are very active and physical.  For arts and crafts, I could be working on a project for hours or days and not want to stop.  I enjoy cutting, pasting, coloring, drawing, painting and being creative.  I enjoy building things and seeing the finished product.  For new discoveries, I enjoy looking things up on the internet to find out new information.  I am naturally curious about things and find it fascinating to learn how things are made or why things are the way they are.  I have been known from my friend to have random facts of knowledge which they call my "Phung-isms".  I can research something that triggers my curiosity for hours and hours.  The other thing that makes me feel most alive is when I am playing sports, especially volleyball.  I am entirely engaged and also take on a whole new level of energy and interest.  I'm like that kid who forgets to eat because they so much want to go outside and play.

Writing to Learn

Currently, I am doing a literacy unit and I am having the students learn how to ask questions in their reading.  As for writing-to-learn strategies, I have not used any formal strategies.  I have used a worksheet that helps students brainstorm ideas, write topic sentences and supporting sentences.

Writing strategies can help students hold their thinking because they can reinforce ideas.  Writing gives students opportunities to hear, see and read what they're thinking.

Older Readers, Vocabulary

"After Third Grade"

After surveying the students in my class, about 90% of them don't like to read or don't find reading important.  However, when I probed a little deeper, some students do enjoy reading magazines, sports pages or comics.  I agree that offering independent reading where they can choose what they like to read is a good way to encourage more reading and begin to introduce reading strategies, however, I would like to know if it would be appropriate to do this with their independent reading choice.  On some days, I have given students time for independent reading (where they can read what they want either from home or from a selection of books in the class), however not done a specific lesson plan with it.  Is this an opportunity to teach or should I keep it as a time to allow students to just read?

"Alternatives to "Look it up in the dictionary!"

Haha.  I was always taught to look up words in the dictionary and I thought that was a strategy for vocabulary development.  However, I ended up experiencing exactly what was in the text.  Students wanted to write down the shortest definition or didn't know which one was appropriate to the reading or assignment.  Then students looked up words that defined it such as the act of that word.  So that wasn't helpful at all.  I get a little nervous teaching vocabulary because I am unsure myself what roots, suffixes, affixes, prefixes mean.  I know it could be a way to learn together, but at that point, who is supposed to teach us the correct answer?  Also, how do you brainstorm meanings of words when my students are already limited in their English?

What specific words in the next unit do you foresee students having difficulty with?  How did you go about choosing these words?

For now, I'm not sure what words I will be selecting for vocabulary development with my students.  Prior to this, we were doing a mini projects with revolutionary 

Strategies That Work/Possible Unit Texts

For my ELD class, I have used various short stories for reading with my students.  These short stories were examples of memoirs, autobiographies and biographies.  There are many challenges that are posed to my students when using these readings.  Many of them have a difficult time with vocabulary, others cannot summarize a reading in their own words and most do not engage with the text.  With some students, it is hard to determine because although their English is limited, their primary language skills aren't, so it is possible they can comprehend the text if it were in their primary language.  I will notice some students decoding words that may sound or look like words they've heard before.  A strategy I think would prove most useful to my students is to self monitor and engage.  That means ask questions as they read, take notes and be active with the text.  

Literacy Pre-Assessment

My early experience as a reader was very positive.  I honestly cannot remember how old I was when I started to read.  I know that I was the only one in my preschool class who was able to recite my ABC's and count to 100.  I know that I really liked school when I was younger and couldn't wait to board the big yellow bus to go to preschool.  I remember when one of my parent's first purchases in the US was a set of Encyclopedias at the GoodWill.  I know that my parents felt it was important to have books in the house, so I always had bookshelves full of books at home.  The very first book I ever remember trying to read was "A Duck is a Duck."  It was this yellow cover with ducks on it and it was for ESL students.  "See duck run.  Run, duck, run."  I clearly remember the pictures and phrases from this book.

As I got older, I remember being rewarded for reading.  In the second grade, I remember reading as part of a Pizza Hut reading program where you would get a free personal pizza after you read so many books.  You would have to fill out this form on what book you read and have your parent sign off on it, then the teacher tracks your progress on this big poster board in class.  After so many books, you would get a coupon for a free pizza at Pizza Hut.  I also remember getting coupons for a free meal at Sizzler.  I remember reading, writing and drawing on these recycled brownish paper with big dotted lines on them for writing.  Then there was blank space at the top of the paper for a drawing.  In the 3rd grade, I remember the RIF (Reading is Fun) program where every year, you would go to the library and there were tables full of books and each student could pick a book to keep.  It was always special for me to be able to get a free book.  I also remember that my mom used to bring home Highlights magazine from her job.  They were my FAVORITE!  I remember doing crossword puzzles, hidden picture, mazes, coloring and comparing pictures to see what was missing.  I remember up until middle school, ordering books from Scholastic.  I used to save my money just to order books and bookmarkers in the Scholastic magazines.  I know at one point, I was into detective solving mysteries and Encyclopedia Brown was my one of my favorite books to read.  I also read and owned all the Babysitter's Club and Box Car Children books.  I also remember every morning I would spend at least 30 minutes in bed reading--just because I wanted to challenge myself to read as much as I could.  My first long novel I ever finished was Little House on the Prairie and it was over 200 pages long.  I remember how proud I was of myself.  I remember over the breaks, I would just find a book in the house and make it a point to finish reading it.  Another book I remember reading was The Color Purple.  It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I remember having to read Nicholas Nickleby over the Christmas Holiday break and I HATED it.  It was about 500 pages.  For some reason, that memory triggers my first real feelings of dreading to have to read.  In high school, I remember reading ALL the time.  I remember reading History Textbooks, and tons of novels and epic stories in my English class.  I remember reading Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Odyssey, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Scarlet Letter--books that I feel any student in any high school across the nation would read.  At that time, I felt they were "classics" and that EVERYONE who went through high school read these.  There were books all 9th graders would read, then the same for 10th, 11th and 12th.  It was a standard book list that we all read certain books in certain grades.

As for writing, I began to LOVE writing at an early age.  I remember my FIRST diary.  It was a birthday present from my sister.  I think I was 6 or 7 years old.  It had a lock on it.  It was white with different color ballon0s all over it.  It had a gold lock on it with a tiny key.  It was a prized possession of mine.  I felt that because it locked, I could write freely whatever I wanted and no one would ever be able to see it.  I wrote religiously, EVERYDAY.  I remember just a few years ago stumbling across some diaries from when I was young.  No matter what kind of day I had, "It was a good day" and that was all I wrote, I wrote EVERYDAY.  In 6th grade, I loved writing love poems.  I used to make cards with poems on them.  I don't know when all that stopped.  I want to say I stopped writing when I got to college.  Time, or lack of maybe.  Or maybe I thought having a diary was silly.  But years later, I began keeping a journal.  I started journaling again consistently for awhile but it's stopped again.  However, when I wrote, nothing could stop me.  I used to tell stories so that you could recreate the experience whenever you read my journal entry.  I used to write about my day, my feelings or just about anything that was on my mind.  It was very therapeutic for me and I used it as a way to reflect and grow.

Today in my classroom, I see literacy as a huge struggle for my students.  I know that the majority of my students don't like to read.  I know because I asked them.  They don't think it's important or they don't think it matters.  I think that's a serious problem and it worries me.  I want to teach my students how to be good, confident readers, but most of all, I want them to love to read.  For this last unit for Trimester 1, I will be focusing on Literacy.  I want to learn how to teach my kids how to read.  I want to teach them how to pronounce words, how to understand what they are reading and that reading is FUN!

Content Standards for UbD Unit

I definitely want to emphasize literacy in my next unit.  There are so many standards to pick from, I get lost trying to figure out what's most important because they all seem important.  However, for now, I've decided to select:

Apply knowledge of word relationship, such as roots and affixes, to derive meaning from literature and texts in content areas.

Read aloud with appropriate pacing, intonation and expression increasingly complex narrative and expository texts.

Use expanded vocabulary and some descriptive words in oral responses to familiar literature.

I begin with these standards because I want my students to become great readers.  I realize that anyone can read words, but not everyone understands or breaks down what they are reading.  I want my students to be able to independently think for themselves and be able to try and understand what they are reading by guessing the meaning of words based on the context in which it's used, what is sounds like or what it looks like to them.  Some students have turned in work using words that they copied and not really knowing what they mean.  I also have some students who I want to build confidence in their reading skills.  Some are shy or are still learning English, so they still have a lot of difficulty in reading.  I also want students to be able to summarize what we read in class.  I want my students to know that their voice and opinion matters and that they can bring text alive, so it is important for my students to be able to articulate themselves using with an expanded vocabulary.

I'm not sure if these are the best standards to choose for what I want to teach, but these are my initial thoughts.  I know I have to decide what it is I want to accomplish with my students by the end of the trimester and stick to it.  I'm having a hard time grasping that I can't teach my students "everything" in 12 weeks and I just have to choose a few things.