Juanita

 A enjoys reading very much and reads regularly at home.  She scored a 91 on reading fluency and was in the partial retelling stage, so we will move down to a third grade level passage next time.

We will have her read the expository piece “Wool: From Sheep to You”.  She needs help with ending sentences at the period, with a pause to make the story easier for the audience to follow.  I would like to see if slowing down her reading with an easier passage would help the flow of her reading. This would also help her comprehension.

Confidence and Learning

It has been enlightening and comforting to learn about how math and emotions are tied together. I have always liked math and done fine with it in school so it is not something I learned about through personal experience. Well, not exactly. Robin said that whenever she tells people she is a math teacher she gets one of two responses every time. I hadn't noticed that before, but once that seed was planted, I started thinking about it and it is totally true. It is the only (almost, and I will get to that later) subject where people always either like it or dislike it.

I see the importance of finding out how students feel about math when you are trying to figure out how you can help them.  Especially students who seem to have given up. If they have negative, hopeless and incompetent feelings about their ability to succeed, they really are doomed. Lack of confidence is absolutely detrimental to learning. I can relate this to my ongoing and worsening feelings about my ability to succeed in the technical part of this program. The lack of confidence has somehow crept in and I almost think that I will never figure it all out. The problem becomes even bigger when students keep slipping further and further behind. It is this level or type of stress that I believe Robin is talking about when she says students need to have some confidence in order to allow their brains work to learn what is necessary to move forward. They need encouragement and help from their classmates, which seems like quite a challenge for teachers to motivate teenagers to do.

We also discussed the "learning tension" that forces students to think in ways that facilitate real learning. It is a disservice to children to not let them struggle at all. This applies to everything, not just math. They need to have some learning tension, but not so much that the stress turns off their brains to new information. Groupworthy tasks can build confidence in learners. They are difficult and time-consuming to plan. They take a lot of time to do well, but I believe the benefits to students are worth it. 

We discussed several ways to plan and execute groupworthy tasks in math, but I still have questions about how to do this successfully on an ongoing basis with all children

Project 1, Final Analysis of Student Writing & Lesson Plan

After working on this lesson plan I realized I would like to draw on some information from the other two writing samples to improve my plan. The one I analyzed first, titled “Annie in 4^th” looked like a final draft and the other two were from earlier stages in the writing process and had more room for improvement, particularly in the area of organization. My revised lesson plan takes this into account. The feedback from my writing group helped shape my revisions as well.

The revised lesson plan will take place in two sessions rather than one for several reasons. I think my lesson plan needs more focus and I do not want overload A with too much information in one conference. I also want to add word choice as an area for improvement. Both lessons will connect to her pre-writing sample titled “We need playground equent” (equipment).

In the first conference we will focus on organization, based on my analysis of the second and third writing samples. We will practice using the graphic organizer. I will ask her to narrow her focus about why she wants a specific type of playground equipment, like a climbing wall or something else and use the graphic organizer to help her add more details.

In the second conference, we will build on her writing from our first writing conference. This time we will focus on word choice, and area for improvement from my analysis of her writing titled “Annie in 4^th”.  Heather suggested using mentor texts (that show how the author accomplished the skill that I am trying to emphasize) to help A see different ways of forming sentences and using words to create lively visual images.  I think that is a great idea and I would like to include this in my lesson plan.

Miscellaneous:

In my first lesson plan, I said A needs help with diagraphs & blends, based on the Error Guide for Elementary Spelling Inventory 1. I was a little confused about its relationship to this assignment of Analysis of Student Writing and Lesson Plan. Since the above is a writing lesson plan, I am not sure where or if this spelling analysis even fits into either of my lesson plans for writing.  I did want to clarify, however, why I think A needs to work on diagraphs and blends and other vowel patterns. I did not use examples in my first blog, so I decided to add them here. These are examples from the results of the error guide: The actual word was drive and she said dive; word was serving, said shving; pleasure-persher confident-conend; marched-march; cellar-sler; shopping-shoping; carries-cries.

Brains & Patterns

One thing I learned on the first day of class is that our brains automatically try to make sense of things we see by grouping things into patterns.
I still have a question about why this is and why we see different patterns when looking at the same thing. Are there certain types of thinkers (e.g. right/left brain) who view things differently.
The implications for classroom practice for this are that if we knew which types of thinkers/students looked at things in similar ways, we would have a common place to start when teaching.
(Robin, FYI - I posted this blog on the first week of class, Jan 10 then I accidentally deleted it when I was trying to organize my labels on Jan 28, so I just re-posted it today, Jan 30, from a printed copy I saved, KB)

Orchestrating Discussions - 5 Practices

This article helped focus my thinking about teaching mathematics to middle level students. It still seems overwhelming, however, the Five Practices Model provides specific ways for managing whole-class discussions. I am learning the importance of planning every minute of classroom time. Quality lessons must be carefully constructed in advance to make good use of the limited time available for teaching math. Anticipating student responses, monitoring their work, selecting and sequencing particular students' responses to move the lesson forward and connecting this all together is a huge task. I wonder how I will be able to all of this at once. Knowing this is quite different than applying in the classroom. It will take a lot of practice and reflection to bring it all together. I guess that is why it is called the practice of teaching.

Project 1: Analysis of Writing and Lesson Plan, Parts 1 & 2

Analysis
I based this analasys on three writing samples from Annie. The first was written in response to a prompt and it looks like a final draft. The prompt was to tell the audience a few things about herself. She thougt we should know three things. She likes reading a lot, she likes to work when it is quiet and she loves school very much. I also used the spelling inventory for further analysis and planning her next lesson.
One of the other samples was an informal outline for an essay and was titled: We need playground equent (equipment). The other was a very rough, probably initital draft of a Bed to Bed Story.

Ownership and Meaning of the Piece
In Annie's writing about her love of reading, she gave us a few details about how and why she enjoys it very much. From this I could tell she was excited about it because she said she can picture a movie when she reads. That brought me into her world and and I started to picture her actually reading like that, which hooked me right away. Another visual for the reader was that she likes to eat an apple sometimes before reading, which showed ownerhip of her story because she appears to have somewhat of a routine when reading. This brought meaning to her writing and made it believable to me and showed that she was speaking from her heart. She likes to read long books and likes Charter Books because they are really fun. She explaied that she likes to work and works better when it is quiet. She loves school too. Annie shared that she likes to read ahead of the class and doesn't want to stop when reading time is over. This heightened my interest in her story becasue she was so enthusiastic and could see that she is a motivated reader and motivated to write about how and why she enjoys it.
While working through this assignment, I realized that we need to see more writing samples. At first I analyzed her paper on her love of reading, but I realized that it has been revised and finished, so it would be more productive to help her work on the letter to the principal to convince him that they need more playground equipment. Based on the Error Guide, we need to work on spelling, in particular digraphs and blends. Annie is an intermediate reader based on the Reading and Writing Stages handout, but her writing is more in the transitional stage and this is where I plan to help her. The 6=1 Trait Writing Scoring Continuum tells me that she is developing: her strengths and need for revision are about equal; about half-way home.

Six traits Assessment
I think her organization in her final story about reading is strong (5). The indtoduction is inviting and she writes thoughtful transitions. Pacing is well controlled. I think her word choice is in the area of a three. The language is functional and it is easy to figure out her meaning on a general level but mostly uses everyday words. She uses accmplish, but spells it wrong. She tries to spice things up by using "nooooooo" to convey feeling. She displayed a somewhat limited vocabulary. The other writing pieces were very different and I wasn't sure how to use these three pieces together to make a lesson plan because they are all from different stages in the writing process. After reviewing the six-traits of Annie's final version of her love of reading story, I realized that the other two writing samples would probably be more useful in planning the next step for improving her writing. The rough draft and the outline have more spelling and transitional and organizational problems that I could draw on. I will have to develop those more for my final analysis of her writing.

Spelling
Ammie's final draft had only a few spelling errors, but the error guide for elementary spelling inventory showed she is in the middle stages of digraphs and blends and the long vowel patterns. This is where I plan to start with as a focus for her lesson plan.

Lesson Plan
Objectives:
The student will be able to use a graphic organizer to identify main events in chronological order as a pre-writing strategy.
The student will be able to use the organizer to effectively structure facts and details in her writing.

Standards:
EALR 1. The student understands and uses a writing process. Component: 1.1 Prewrites to generate ideas and plan writing. Component 1.1.1 Applies more than one strategy for generating ideas and plannign writing.

Materials:
Paper, pencil, more writing samples (for later).

Instructional Strategies:
I will ask Annie about the reasons she thinks they need new playground equipment and work with her to find out more details about why. We will work together to revise her draft and work on transitions.

Assessment:
I will see how much help she needs in revising her draft and work with her onn the 6-Traits Analysis Organizer.

Gapminder Website

On January 10, I learned how to use the Gapminder website. I had only seen it used in lessons in biology and geography classes last year. I loved it then and was so excited to see it again and to begin to learn how to use it.

I still have questions about how to use it to show historical population growth and estimations for future population growth in various places. I saw this in a class in the past, but it was shown as sort of pyramid and hourglass shapes that moved over time, but I can't remember if this was on Gapminder or something else.

The implications of Gapminder in classrooms is that since it is visually stimulating, I think students will be easily drawn to it and will be motivated and able to learn how to use it fairly quickly. For me, just watching the colored bubbles bounce around brought many questions to mind and it was fun to find the answers....they kept leading to new questions. Great for inquiry lessons.