Shared Reading: Modeling

If it is one thing we need to learn from Dr. Frye is marinade and modeling.  I have never experienced modeling until Dr. Frye did it for us while we were working on our pirate unit.  I think it is a great way to teach kids how to think, comprehend, and figure out how to read.  I think it is important to tell them that with practice it will come naturally.  I think it will be a difficult task to slow down and go through the text and pick out what you are thinking and share it with your students.  I think it would be a great idea for us to practice that in class.  It is one thing to see it, but it is another to actually pick a text and pick out the important things to teach to your students.  I liked the last quote from the article because that is pretty much what the expert teacher was saying.  Some teachers do know what they are thinking while their reading.  They need to slow down and take the time to figure out what they are thinking and share that with their children.  This was a really great article because we ot to hear from real teachers.  I would love to find out more information about reading strategies and how to teach them to students.  I had never been exposed to this, but I think it is a great way to teach kids how to read and I think that they will enjoy reading more because they will better understand the text.  Are there any books or articles that describe the strategies in “normal people’s” language?

Matching books to the student’s level

I thought this was a really helpful article.  Finding meaningful books and matching them to students’ instructional levels seems like a difficult task, but with the lists of books and grade levels provided there is no reason for a teacher to have multiple reading groups (as well as spelling groups) going on in the classroom.  Planning for my unit I have come across the problem of finding appropriate books about Thanksgiving for my kindergarten class.  Reading the article helped solidify the fact that teachers need to asses students to find out their instructional levels to make the students more succesful in reading and comprehension as well as build self-confidence.  I know that it may take extra time and planning but I will make it a priority to find out the levels my students are on and select the right books for them to help them be successful.  That is what a teacher’s job is, to help her students be the most successful at anything that they do!

Blackbeard

Reading The Not So Jolly Roger was very cute! I think boys that may not be “into” reading would like this series.  I really want to get some of the other books and read them!

Update:  I found some pirate books at Black Bear Books today, I almost bought them but I forgot my money!! Tragic! They were on sale too!! Maybe they will be there when I go back to pick up the book I ordered!

Internet Workshop

I thought that this was a very informational article on how to incorporate the internet into the classroom.  I think many teachers are afraid to let their students use the internet, but it is a great resource for the classroom.  I liked how the article was pretty much step-by-step instructions of how to use the internet in a positive way in the classroom.  The part of the article about teaching children how to analyze the information that they read on the internet I believe is a major skill that they need.  I learned about this in my CI3850 class this summer, a child was researching WWII and he found a website that said the holocaust never happened.  He believed it because he read it on the internet.  In this lesson students navigate many different websites and compare information.  It is very important for students to know that anyone can publish anything on the internet, but it doesn’t make it true.  I think this pirate unit is going to be a lot of fun and I can’t wait to set sail and find much more information about pirates!

Yo-Ho-Ho!

I am really excited about starting the pirate unit.  I have never really learned anything about pirates and I am interested to learn more about them.  I really liked how the article tells teachers how to implement the pirate unit into the classroom and to get kids interested.  I mean what kid wouldn’t be interested in learning about pirates.  This gives a child a sense of adventure along with learning historical facts and details.  I liked how the pirate notebook was also included because we have learned how important it is to write in notebooks!  Yo-Ho-Ho I can’t wait!!

Two Pictures of Ordinary Items

Noodle

 

Clothes Hanger

Brown Angels

I liked the pictures in this book, but I didn’t really understand some of the poems.  I wish each poem had been all on one page, that was a little confusing for me.  I understand now that “Love That Boy” is in this book that inspired “Love That Dog.”  I think that it is a good idea to use these books together to show the thought process of Sharon Creech on how she wrote her book.  I wasn’t a bog fan of these poems, but I usually get more out of a book or poem after I talk about it with a group of people.  I hope we talk about it in class, it might help me to understand better.

All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

I enjoyed reading the poems in this book.  I think it is important to let children read poems that don’t rhyme and are short.  Most children feel lost when they have to write a poem, but when they can take ordinary every day objects and write poetry about them like Valerie Worth, they can feel confident and be inspired by her poems.  I really liked the poem “Barefoot” and “Sidewalks.”  It reminded me of being a kid and loving to take my shoes off the second I got home from school!  I think these poems would be great for kids to imitate.  I am excited about the ones we are going to be writing in class!

Love That Dog!

I really liked reading this book.  It was written in a really different and innovative way.  It was like a journal entry, but it was also like dialogue.  I think it really captured how children, especially boys, feel about writing and reading poetry.  Sometimes I think children and adults are embarrassed to let other people read their writing.  Letting someone read your writing makes you vulnerable, and that scares people.  I really liked that the poems the teacher used were in the back of the book, that would be really helpful for a teacher to use in their classroom to have all the poems right there with the book!  I can’t wait to read Hate That Cat!

What’s in a name?

This website had no meaning for my name.  It was disheartening.  All it said was that “Stephanie is the female version of Stephen.”  I took it upon myself to look at a baby name website and I found out that my name means “crown or garland.”  I am okay with that because I feel like I always have a crown on my head!

I usually don’t like assignments like these where you go and ask your parents about meaningful stories of names and events, because my mom can never help me.  Her answer is usually “I don’t know, your name was pretty, we just liked it.”  Or she won’t remember anything about a specific event of my life, so I never have any good stories about how things came to be in my life.  I always feel left out when people tell these awesome stories and I have nothing to tell.  Since my mom can never tell me a story and I feel left out, I am not sure that I would use this assignment in my class.

I think I like my nicknames more than my real name because they have meaning to me.

Doodle Bug:  My mom and dad have called me this forever.  They don’t even use my given name that much anymore, it’s just Doodle Bug now.  There is no story behind it, it just stuck!

Perk:  I used to hate my last name because it started with P.  In elementary school there were always more than one Stephanie in the class, and I was always “Stephanie P.” Kids would say my name and laugh and it would really make me mad, but when I got to high school my teacher, Mr. McCulloch, started calling me “Perky.” It started in 9th grade and I had him for two more years after that, the name stuck and everyone called me Perky.  I liked it, I would walk down the halls and hear “Hey Perky!”  My senior year Mr. McCulloch left our school, and my best friend, Josh, felt the need to shorten it to just Perk.  And now four years later he still calls me Perk.  It’s funny though, only a select few people call me Perk.  When people who normally call me Steph or Stephanie use Perk, they stop and say “Oh that’s weird!” and then they start over with Steph.