After we received this noteblog, one student in my class came to mind almost immediately. I will call this student Claire. Claire is very shy and keeps to herself a lot. I have just noticed recently that she is opening up to her peers. Claire is one of the students in our lowest reading groups. She not only struggles with reading, but most classes in school. She is currently being tested to see if she qualifies for special education. I work with her a lot, I have noticed that she struggles greatly with reading. She tries to decode words, but when she cannot get it she just skips it. In centers, I notice that she skips a lot of the questions and just guesses at an answer, especially in the sliders center where the questions are multiple choice. In math, she does not understand the directions to the problems because she cannot read them. She is constantly seeking help, but wants us to tell her the answer. When I have her work through the reading we eventually get there, but it is slow and she requires a lot of help. After reading some of the suggestions in the text, the following are a few activities I would consider doing with her.
One of the suggestions in Tompkins is to have the children retell and dramatize stories. I think this would be a good activity for her to do because she spends so much time focusing on decoding words that she is not taking meaning from the text. By retelling the story and acting it out she would have to remember what she read. I think it would help to stop her as she was reading and ask, "What just happened in the story?" This would make her slow down and she would only have to remember small parts of the text at a time. I think she has to spend so much time decoding it would probably be hard to hold all that information in her head at once. I might also have her draw a picture of what happened in the story to show me that she understood.
Another activity I would do with her is to have her write with a single idea to her compositions. This is actually from the beginner readers section of Tompkins, however, I feel like she could handle it. This is something that our CT already does with the students. However, most of their writing time consists of writing what they want and then showing it to the teacher. I think that if Claire was encouraged to sit down and write about one idea and share it with her table group at the same time she would be more likely to stick to an idea. I noticed that she is jumping around in her writing a lot. I might also have her write a thought web first to concentrate her ideas around one single idea to write about. I think this will help her think about what to write about. Even though she only writes a few sentences on each page this will help her concentrate her writing.
One of the things in the Gibbons text I really enjoyed was the going from speaking to writing sequence in chapter three. I think a lesson structured like this would really help students like Claire. Currently, when we read a text out of their language arts book, our CT goes over all of the vocabulary first. I think it would be good to read the text first and then ask the students what they think the word means based on what they read. This would help students like Claire take in the context around the word to figure out the meaning. This technique will help them when they are independently reading and come across a word they are unfamiliar with. I also like the journal writes after they talk about what they have learned. This would help Claire practice her writing by getting her ideas down on paper. She would also have more of an idea of what to write because we would have just discussed it.
I think Claire would benefit from this activities because they would help her focus on what she is reading or writing. If she learns to take context clues from her reading or writing she will be better at doing this work independently. Also, working with her group during writing would also help her. She struggle a lot with coming up with things to write about. By sharing ideas I think this would help her.
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When I thought of this blog post, I chose some activities to use with a small group of students that reflected the types of scaffolding activities I would use with the entire class, it was simply that the students I chose could use the extra time and support. I really like, though, the amount of thought and detail you put into choosing scaffolding activities that would best help just one student in particular. It reminded me how important it is to look at every student as an individual learner with different needs. I also like how you provided us with some background information on Claire. It helped me see how the activities you chose would directly affect her as a reader, and, at the same time, it allowed me to think about using these strategies with a student in my classroom who seems similar to Claire.
ReplyDeleteI especially liked the idea you chose from Tompkins about having the student retell the story. I think allowing students to think of literature through different avenues – like drawing, acting, retelling, etc. – places the story on a more personal level for the student. It can also help them to visualize the text in a more concrete way that they will be better able to recall in the future. Also, I think writer’s workshop is a great way to help improve literacy, but also, as you said, needs to be individualized in some cases. If Claire is having trouble focusing, I think a word web, or even an entire journal of brainstorming activities would help her. This way, when she is struggling with things to write about, she can always look back in her journal and pick a topic she thought of earlier but hasn’t yet written about.
Finally, I found it interesting that you prefer students to read texts first and learn new vocabulary as they go along. I had never really thought of taking this route with language arts, simply because the vocabulary words are provided on the first page, therefore seemed to me to be a prompt for the story. I would be interested in seeing how your idea would work with my students, though it would probably take a much longer time to get through Language Arts this way. Young students, however, need that time and support so I think it could ultimately be successful.
I am glad you thought my ideas were good. I really enjoy thinking of my learners individually and I think this will benefit my future students. I am a big fan of small group work as well as work in pairs. Currently my CT has our class broken into groups based on ability level. I think this is a good idea, but I also feel my class needs some time to work with mixed-ability groups. This way students such as Claire benefit from the help and guidance of her peers. I also really liked your ideas to use word webs and brainstorming. I think this would help Claire a lot and I am eager to have her do this first before we start or next writing assignment. I had completely forgotten about writer’s workshop so I am really glad you brought it up. I think Claire would benefit a lot from something like that. Reading first and then going over vocabulary is actually something I got from the reading. I actually saw our substitute teacher use this skill last week and it worked really well! I had some apprehensions about it because second graders seem so young, however after the teacher had read the excerpt and then would ask what a word meant, the students were able to take information from the context around the word and apply it to what the word may mean. My class focuses a great deal on vocabulary so this may be some of the reasons it works so well. My CT posts all the old vocabulary words around the room and we actually hear the kids say and use them which is really great! Thanks for your ideas and opinions!
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