Writing Video Response

1)  The three main components of a successful writing program are personal connections, writing conventions, and inventions.  Personal connections are extremely important for student writing.  Students are more apt to write about their own stories, experiences, or how their thoughts and experiences relate to the writing subject.  This becomes key when students are asked to write about something in a specific content area.  When students are encouraged to write about the topic with reference to their own prior knowledge, experience, and ideas, the more interesting their writing will be and they will also learn about the different writing types.  The writing type in this example would be formal or expository writing, or could be considered as a report.  Students who have writing journals will know that this writing is much more informal.

2)  I would encourage students to write in their writing journal, not only for particular assignments, but whenever the spirit moves them.  I, myself will carry around my own journal and take a few minutes every day or every few days to share an excerpt from my own journal.  This modeling could show them that writing in this informal format can be helpful for the expression of their own ideas.  I will also remind them that they live in New York City (assuming this is where I stay to teach) and that silly or odd things happen around us all the time, but we become a bit desensitized to all of it.  Writing can help us get in touch will own human thoughts and feelings.  

I would also try to incorporate short writing assignments during content learning such as history.  During this time I would try to help students to incorporate their own personal experiences.

3)  There are many ways to incorporate personal connections with different subject areas.  It science, asking students if they've come in contact with similar things or if they or anyone else they know have experienced or seen a phenomenon.  History and social studies could easily link English Language Learners from those particular countries or students who have traveled with their families.

4)  Observing the writing conventions that students use can help a teacher know the order in which to teach these conventions.  If a majority of the class as issues with capitalizing words correctly like for a proper noun or at the beginning of a sentence, then a teacher could focus on that.  If students have issues with knowing when to begin a new paragraph, the teacher would focus on this convention.  One to two conventions at a time would be best.

During a previous observation during a collaborative team teaching class,  students were expected to edit their writing assignments by referring to a color coded editing chart located in the writing folder.  They were to go through the writing with the indicated colored marker (green for spelling, red for paragraph, blue for punctuation, etc.).  They were to circle or mark in some way any mistakes or anything they were unsure of before they begin their final drafts.  I'm sure that throughout the year, the teachers went over each of these conventions and this was part of the application and culmination of what they have learned.

5)  Students should be encouraged to use invention and creative writing in their writing journals, during language arts assignments, and even through some (select) content writing assignments.  I was always encouraged when writing reports to use interesting facts, create a narrative, or use fun quotations to lure the reader into my expository writing as long as it related to the topic at hand.  Students should be encourage to try out different styles of writing or blend these styles.

Observation Week 6- Final Week

Since I have been blessed with jury duty on our Spring Break, I was able to observe at the Elias Howe School on Tuesday, March 22nd.  I didn't want to schedule my final observation on Friday because I was unsure whether I would be selected to sit on a jury.  If I had been, I would have lost a week or more of observation opportunities.  I was told that if a person was chosen for jury duty, most cases last a week or two, but they were currently trying to assign people to 4 to 6 month long cases!  Needless to say, I was nervous about that.


It was a very busy day last Tuesday in Ms. C.'s first grade classroom.  The students were guided by their classmate, Callie, through the current day of the week including the month and year; they counted all the days of the month and named the days of the week; and they counted by tens, fives, and twos all the days that they have attended school.  While observing Jhon during this morning meeting, I've noticed that he was mouthing the words or speaking with the class more often than at the beginning of my observations.  He appeared to be a little more confident when reading aloud as a group, especially in this familiar context.


Then when we were about to begin their persuasive letter writing, Firefighter Tom came in for a talk on preventing fire.  All the kids were paying the keenest attention on the firefighter and were eagerly answering his questions about playing with matches and fire alarms.  We watched this really cheesy fire safety video called Be Cool About Fire Safety with Gilbert Gottfried as the fire alarm and Lindsey Lohan as the kid who burns the toast:  
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/974dpi/be-cool-about-fire-safety
The kids really enjoyed the video and it brought about a lot of conversation.  Before leaving, Firefighter Tom was nice enough to give the Ms. C. his home address so the kids could write him letters.  The students have been writing letters to family and friends, but they haven't had the opportunity to send a letter through the post to someone other than a family member.  When the firefighter left, we started thank you letters to Firefighter Tom.  As I walked around, it seemed that all of the students, including Jhon, are getting a little better about picking specific details of what they enjoyed and including it in their writing.  Previously, it took a lot of probing questions to get Jhon to think about what other important details he could put in his writing.  With this writing assignment, Jhon picked out the details of the video that he liked and included these in his thank you letter.
Then we were interrupted again by a postman, so then there was another question and answer session with the students.  Jhon was much more quiet and reserved during this portion of the day.


The rest of my day was filled with checking the students' homework because Ms. C. had forgotten her glasses that day.  I was in a bit of a rush checking through all the homework in their homework folders, making copies of their differentiated homework packets for next week, and helping students who would approach me during my hectic moments.  We also discovered that for some reason, the writing piece that I was intending to make a copy of for this case study is missing.  It wasn't posted on the wall like it should have been, it wasn't with the ELL teacher, and it wasn't in his file of writing.  Ms. C. and I exchanged emails and telephone numbers in case it pops up.  Since I will be at the school for a couple of weeks for my other class, I can always swing by to pick it up later.

Results and Analysis of Youtube Assessments

Results:
Word Lists:  
Grade 1- 80% Automatic- Instructional  85% Total- Instructional
Grade 2 (first try)-  5% Automatic- Frustration  5% Total- Frustration
Grade 2-  70% Automatic- Instructional  90% Total- Independent
Grade 3-  10% Automatic- Frustration  15% Total- Frustration


Oral Reading:
Passage Name:  Mouse in a House
Readability Level: 1
Passage Type- N
78% Familiar
Total Accuracy:  96% Instructional
Retelling:  27%
# Explicit:  4
# Implicit:  0
Comprehension:  67%
Total Passage Level:  Instructional


Passage Name:  Whales and Fish
Readability Level:  2
Passage Type:  E
78% Unfamiliar
Total Accuracy:  97% Instructional
Retelling:  29%
# Explicit:  2
# Implicit: 4
Comprehension:  75%
Total Passage Level:  Instructional, but I would consider trying a Grade 3 passage because the results are borderline.


* Note:  I was doing what the book calls "Total Accuracy" except that I did not count Self Corrections as errors.  This also may skew the results while using the book's given scales that indicate level.


Explanation:


Because of the student's low speaking voice and whispering during the reading list portion, it was difficult on my computer (without additional speakers) to tell the difference between her speaking out a word and her whispering trying to sound out the word.  It is because of this that I counted correct anything that I could hear and understand whether it would be in a soft speaking voice or a whisper.  During the second round of Word List 2, see originally skipped numbers 17-19, but she got them correct when she went back to them.  It is because of this, I counted them correctly identified but not automatic which is why the scores between automatic (70%) and total (90%) are so different.  I also felt that the student had some confidence issues especially during Word List 2.  Unfortunately, Word List 3 was intimidating to the student and she was unable to continue.  I'm sure that she didn't know all the words on the list, but once she got to the word "rough" she got discouraged.  It is because of these results that I think working on sight words and spelling patterns could help her raise her reading level.


During the reading of Mouse in a House, the student had some issues with the endings of words such as saying "years" for "year", "walls" for "wall", "floor" for "floors", and "visit" instead of "visited".  I honestly think that she may have not been paying attention and did not use contextual clues to make these corrections.  She may also lack the knowledge of tenses when she confuses "come" for "came" etc.  There was one possible miscue that I was hesitant to count:  When the student says "They" when it was supposed to be "Then" at the beginning of a sentence, but then she pauses a second and says "Then".  I'm not sure whether this was a Self Correction or an Insertion so I counted it as a miscue for the time being (just for the sake of practice).  I counted 12 ideas during her retelling and I found her comprehension to be Instructional because I counted her response "Because they love mouse" incorrect even though this was only due to her miscue during her reading.


During her reading of Whales and Fish she continued her pattern with the ends of some words such as "lived" for "live" and "animal" for "animals".  She also mispronounced "most" for "must" and "thought" for "through".  These are definitely visual graphic miscues that could possibly be helped with practicing sight words.  During this particular reading, she had many Self-Corrections and Repeated, but I believe that it was because this was an unfamiliar expository text so whenever she was unsure of a pronunciation or whether a sentence sounded correct, she would repeat it.  I counted 14 ideas in her retelling and found her comprehension to be much better than I thought it would be.  She got correct more implicit answers than explicit, though, which may be a problem because this is an expository text and students should be taking and using information located in the text rather than from prior knowledge.  For instance, the question:  "According to the passage, how are whales and fish different?" the student responded that "whales are bigger and fish are smaller".  This was an implicit answer, but it was not from the text.  Also, this is a generalization.  Yes, most whales are bigger than fish, but there are some relatively smaller whale species in the world and there are also some gigantic fish as well.  We can't really say that this one is correct, so I counted in wrong.  On the other hand, she answered the question, "Where are fins?" with "at the back".  She didn't explicitly say "tail" so I counted it as an implicit answer instead because she understands the general idea, but the specific detail doesn't come to her mind.


To help the student with her reading, I feel that working on sight words, her being explicitly taught the tenses (past, present, future), and teaching her strategies to link important details to the main point of an expository text would be an excellent start to strengthen her literacy skills.

Observation Week 5

Wednesday, March 16th, I arrived at the school at about 11:45 am, right after the students ate lunch.  We began with their math lesson where they had to complete three pages of word problems from their workbooks.  They had to show their work for questions like, "I have 9 shapes.  Some are circles.  Some are triangles.  There are more circles than triangles.  How many different combinations can we make?"  I spent much of this time having students read the problem to me aloud and asking them what they understood about the problem.  Many times, I had to ask probing questions like, "So, how many shapes are we supposed to end up with all together?", "Is there a clue in here that is supposed to help us narrow down the combinations?", and "What does the word more mean to you?".  Most students did fairly well with the guidance I helped provide.  Jhon did very well, too.  Once he understood the concept of more than, he grasped that there couldn't be less triangles than circles, nor could they be equal.  After the first problem like this, he was on a roll.  He didn't quite finish the entire assignment, but he did well.  There was one student at Jhon's table, I will call him Jake, that did not seem to grasp this type of equation at all.  I tried using the coaching that worked for other students, but he could only come up with one solution.  I tried referring to my fingers and we counted out loud.  This helped him verbalize an answer, but he didn't remember it long enough (or didn't understand it well enough) to write it down.  I then tried referring to the number line on his desk (that he said he understood how to use), but that didn't seem to help either.  I felt more stumped than he did.


In between math and writing, I was able to squeeze a quick assessment with Jhon.  I gave him the choice of reading either "I Can" (Preprimer 1) or "Just Like Mom" (Preprimer 2).  He chose to read "I Can" after looking through both.  During our last assessment, he scored at Instructional level, but it was borderline.  He could have gotten one more word correct and he would have been at Independent level.  I went ahead and gave him this assessment and he scored at the Independent level.  He knew what all the concept questions were and he gave me a logical prediction of the story before we began, "I can do things.  They do things.".  During the running record, he had one miscue on the word lunch, he said food instead which tells me that he relies much on visual cues from the pictures.  He stuttered on the first dream, he repeated it and self-corrected.  The second dream was correct.  I believe that he knew to say dream partially because I asked him a concept question about the word dream and from the visual cues of the picture.  He also scored at the Independent level in comprehension.  Both of these assessments tell me that Jhon needs to work on his sight word vocabulary so that he is less reliant on picture cues.  Maybe I could create a mini-lesson with common rhyming words using Dr. Seuss and another lesson on common spelling combinations.


If I have the opportunity to do another assessment with Jhon, I would either give him "People at Work" (Preprimer 2) or "Lost and Found" (Preprimer 3).  I am considering skipping preprimer 2 only because I am curious to know how Jhon will do on a piece of short poetry with no pictures.  Plus, I know that Jhon understands the words and concepts of lost, under, outside, dog, and cat because we have discussed many of these things previously during reading and writing time.


During the writing portion of the day, the students were working on writing letters to people in their lives.  Jhon chose to write to his father in Ecuador.  After his salutations and his request for a new toy, he became stumped about what to write next.  I made a few suggestions like talking about when they last saw each other and I asked Jhon if he missed his dad, but he just nodded his head yes.  I don't think that Jhon understands "missing someone" using English vocabulary because when I came back to him, he seemed to continue a little further with his request for a new toy and didn't touch at all about missing his father.

ISCA- Informational Strategic Cloze Assessment Reflection

The ISCA or the Informational Strategic Cloze Assessment is a helpful tool used to assess comprehension in first, second, and third graders with expository texts.  It is designed to assess the four dimensions of comprehension:  the use of comprehension strategies, knowledge of informational text features, comprehension of graphics in the context of text, and vocabulary comprehension and strategies.  The assessment takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes (depending on the student) which makes this assessment unrealistic to use on an entire class.  Despite this, it may be most effective to apply this tool to students who may have reading or comprehension problems, or to a random set of students to help the teacher find a well-balanced path for whole class instruction.
The assessment consists of two expository texts:  Rocks and Weather.  Both of these texts come with detailed scripts for the teacher, assessment questions and prompts, and scoring sheets.  The student either reads the text (or the teacher reads it to them) and the student is to fill in the missing words using contextual clues, graphic clues, prior knowledge, and other strategies.  When calculating the score, one could look at the overall score which would be the most accurate, or one could analyze particular portions in order to view individual students' needs and comprehension strategies.
This assessment sounds like it would be extremely useful in the classroom.  I would most definitely use a comprehension specific test such as this because comprehension can be a major issue for many readers.  I do know that my target student, Jhon, has comprehension issues when reading text that doesn't have much to do with his own prior knowledge or when text has humor that he doesn't have the language skills to comprehend yet.  When I asked him questions after reading "I See" from the QRI-5, he was able to answer four explicit questions correctly, but when I asked him what the pig was doing at the end of the story (the line was "doing a jig") but he replied with, "he was dancing".  According to the QRI-5, this is correct as an implicit question because he observed the graphic clues of the picture of the pig "dancing".  It would have been interesting to see how Jhon would have done with the ISCA, but I fear that some of the concepts would be still slightly out of reach for him at the moment.
This also reminded me of another moment when one of Jhon's fellow classmates asked if she could read me a book- I will call her Callie.  She brought me a short expository text about trucks.  Each page was a short sentence stating what a truck can do such as mix cement, dump garbage, etc.  I really liked this book because at the end it had a glossary of terms that could be difficult for students like cement, vehicle, dump, etc.  I had Callie attempt to read to me the definitions (those she couldn't read, I read to her).  I told her that I love books with glossaries at the back because it helps me figure out things that I didn't understand before, and that if I would have known it was there before when I didn't understand something, I would have jumped to the back and figured out the words that I didn't know.  I hope that this is a reading strategy that will stick with her as she continues learning to read.

Week 4 of Observation

This past Wednesday, I came in after lunch (around 11:40 am) because I knew that Ms. C. would only have the students for about a half an hour anyway and there's no sense in me being there when I'm not working with the students.
Apparently, on this particular day, report cards were due and the school insists on using a complicated and detailed format that teachers barely know how to use and parents can't understand without asking twenty questions.  Needless to say, Ms. C. was stressed out because she was running out of time to turn these in.  On the plus side, the whole day was dedicated to students working on their piece of writing that they were going to publish (for the publishing party tomorrow) and when they were done, to read either independently, in pairs, or in small groups.  This gave me several hours of experience working with my target student and his classmates.
Jhon's piece that he was going to publish was the same piece that I helped him work on last week about his character, Ben, falling into a swimming pool with all of his clothes on.  This week, the piece was written, colored, and nearly ready to turn in.  I was extremely proud of him and this feeling only grew when he read the piece out loud for me.  As he read, he made corrections to areas of writing that didn't sound correct!  He originally forgot the word "to" in one sentence and he used a singular instead of a plural in another part of a sentence.  He corrected both of these after listening to his mistakes.  This is a huge step in Jhon's English literacy!  Ms. C. gave him a high five when I told her that he can make his own corrections by using reading out loud as a strategy.
After he turned in his writing, he read me three short books and he has made some strides in his reading as well.  I noticed that he uses contextual clues from pictures, but he also tries to sound out the words too not to assume that the picture is always correct.  He reads with more emotion and fluency especially when he is excited to share his reading with me.  He tends to read better when he suggests that he reads to me rather than when I suggest it to him.
We also tried two word lists:  Pre-Primer 1 and Pre-Primer 2/3.  Jhon zoomed through the pre-primer word list like it was nobody's business!  Out of the seventeen words, all but one was automatic and all but two were correct.  This was clearly independent level.  The pre-primer 2/3 list showed different results.  He got ten out of twenty correct and out of those all but one was automatic.  This was his frustration level.  From here, I asked him to read "I See" from QRI-5.  He only had two miscues and two self corrections which makes this his instructional level.  One miscue was instead of "an" he said "a" and the other miscue occurred when he said "jag" instead of "jig".  He self corrected on "rug" because he almost said "rag" and he said "car" instead of "truck" but when he realized that duck doesn't rhyme with car and it doesn't match the picture, he made the correction.

Question 2 for My Classmates

What would be some ways that you would inspire students to read even though they say things like, "I don't like to read because it's hard."?

Film Clips from Reading Rocks!

The whole episode of Reading Rocks! was very good, but my focus is on the portion about the student named Maricely.  Maricely is a Puerto Rico born fifth grade student with troubles reading in English.  Like my target student, Jhon, Maricely's family speaks solely Spanish at home and Spanish is the primary language of her Massachusetts neighborhood.  Luckily for Maricely, her mother speaks minimal Spanish and her older sister helps her with reading at home.
I thought her case was interesting because she was having so much trouble with reading and spelling in English that she was held back in the fifth grade when she should have graduated into the sixth grade.  She said that she was very upset and angry, but she didn't want to give up.  Her main troubles were with how there can be more than one way to make the same sound in English, such as f and ph or rhyming words like though and show.  In order to combat this, her focus has been on learning spelling patterns and reading by analogy like in this week's chapters for our leadership discussion.  Once a student learns a spelling pattern such as air, they can use this to help them decode words with the same spelling pattern such as hair, chair, pair, and even multisyllabic words such as debonair.

Week 3 of Observation

Another hectic day of observation took place this past Wednesday, but at least I got to work with my target student with literacy skills this time!  The difficult part about Wednesdays is that their schedule changed to have Rosie's Broadway Dance tap class first, a short amount of downtime to "shop for books", followed by music, then lunch.  No reading or math at all until after lunch and most of the students are lethargic right after lunch.  This was definitely noticeable in Jhon's reading.
In the afternoon, Ms. C. asked me to read with Jhon on the rug a book that was above his level with lots of character dialogue.  The idea of the exercise was to have the students read character dialogue with emotion.  In this case, since the book was high above his level, I did most of the reading, but I asked him to read with me any words that he knew.  Occasionally, I would stop at a word that I knew that he would know and ask him to read it.  I did this a partially to keep his attention since he seemed tired and he seemed to drift a bit.  This is also why I decided not to expose him to the word lists from QRI-5 yet, especially after this difficult exercise.  I was afraid he would burn out.  During several pieces of dialogue, I would read the character's lines with emotion and have Jhon echo what I read.  There was a point where the phrase "drive me bananas" came up.  I asked him what that meant and he didn't know.  I told him, "loco en la cabasa" and I made a goofy face and did the universal sign for crazy twirling my finger next to my brow.  Jhon giggled about that and it helped him relax a bit more.  I just kept telling him that this is a really hard book and we can just read and learn together.
Ms. C. gladly gave me access to all of his past writing to make copies.  I chose two pieces from the beginning of the year and I will choose a piece or two that I have been helping him with later.  Already, I see a big difference in his writing.  He is exercising on his own the strategy of writing words that he is unsure about onto a post-it note before writing in on his journal paper for his writing assignments.  Of course, occasionally, I will come and help him "stretch out" the word for him to spell and remind him of certain blends like "sh", but he is making improvements.  Jhon really tries hard and it shows.
There is a correction that I want to make to his background information.  Jhon lives with his grandmother here in the city while his parents are living in Ecuador (because his father is a professional soccer player there).  It is possible that during the summer, Jhon will be whisked back to Ecador where he will speak nothing but Spanish again.  Right now, his grandmother is taking Ms. C.'s advice in setting up playdates with students who are English proficient and speak Spanish.  Hopefully, his grandmother will grant permission for him to do "Working Lunch" where students eat lunch in a classroom with a reading specialist and are both read to and asked to read.  Ms. C. feels a bit hesitant to send Jhon home (both home here and Ecuador in the summer) with the advice (or materials) to watch programming such as Dora the Explorer and other PBS shows or books to read for fear that his parents might feel judged.  It is a difficult situation, but it would be a shame if Jhon leaves for two months only to forget all that he has learned again, yet parents have the right to be with their son no matter their location.