Cracking the Alphabet Code

Children love to work with interactive websites because they are more than point and click; they are fun!

These sites contain multimedia with top quality content. They are the sort that teachers will recommend to each other again and again, and new readers will enjoy learning how to break the alphabet code.

Can't go wrong with Professor Garfield -.
for phoneme awareness try Orson's Farm

Fruit Phonics - orange you glad I found this for you?

Practice with Spelling

Portfolio Assessment: A view of "self" within a system of educational expectations

In 1996, Bonnie S. Sunstein, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Iowa, wrote

"Assessing Portfolio As s e s sment : Three Encounters of a Close Kind " offering an explanation of this form of assessment . I especially respect her explanation of portfolios being a way for one to view themselves against a standard of an"other". The questions she gathered from professionals to use with students are helpful to jump-start the highly complex processes of reflection and reflextive thinking.

From: Voices from the Middle Volume 3 Number 4 November 1996

'via Blog this'

"...we don't allow ourselves or our students to look hard enough at what they've learned. When we can't look, we don't see..."

The difference between portfolios and other forms of school "assessments" is the voices of the portfolio-keepers looking internally at their own growth as it happens (reflection), and then looking externally toward what the school expects (reflexive). They create materials, examine their progress, and design the opportunities to assess their own collections, self-evaluating and reflecting about their work while documenting how it stands up against a school's expectations. Curriculum should not be a mystery to students. When students assess their own work by reviewing it-describing, listing, and analyzing what they've done-they begin to articulate their own learning within a teacher's curriculum.

Three Types of Portfolio Analysis

I. A Reflective Encounter: Self to Self

Taking the time to re-see one's self in light of the other is a highly sophisticated "higher order critical skill."
Reflection is what we call analysis in literature, documentation in science, or exegesis in liturgy. It is hard to explain and even harder to arrange.

2. A Reflexive Encounter: Self to Other

The reflection bridge is a two-way street.
A student comes to learn as she reflects on her work, "but if you tell me what your standard is, I'll tell you how the stuff in my portfolio shows that I can meet your standard."
This process is a reflexive one.
A portfolio-keeping process must be at once reflective and reflexive
Establishing opportunities for reflexivity is a matter of allowing students to represent processes in a portfolio as well as in products.
Representing processes requires responsibility, ownership, a sense of agency

3. A Dialectical Encounter: Teacher as Mediator

Portfolios are valuable because they offer the opportunity for a "self' to set itself next to an "other" in order to understand itself better.
They are valuable because they allow an individual to assess-internally- her own developing sense of standards, and then to assess-externally-how she meets those of her school and the communities to which she wants to belong.
And teachers must be at the center of this process with students.
A curriculum should never be a mystery to a student who keeps a portfolio; it should provide a framework and a set of goals that the student ought to be able to meet in her own way

The Reflective Encounter

Questions that Identify, Clarify, and Look for Change

(from experienced teachers)

Alan Purves, SUNY Albany

What do you know that you didn't know before?
What can you d o that you couldn't do before?
What do you d o that you couldn't do before?

Jane Hansen, University of New Hampshire

What is different in your portfolio now than six months ago?

J Sommers, Miami University, Ohio

How are your writing and your composing processes different now than they were when you began compiling this portfolio?
Which class activities (journal writing, peer response groups, revision, etc.) have affected your writing and your composing process this semester, and what effects have they had?

Sally Hampton, New Standards Managtng

Director; 1992-95 Portfolio Project,

English/Language Arts

If you were to choose one piece of work that represents your best effort, what would you choose?
Why is it a significant effort?
When you revise your work, what lenses do you use to determine what to change?

Lora Wol f f , Keokuk High School, Iowa

After looking over all your artifacts, what is missing?
What connections exist among the artifacts in your portfolio?
Explain the connections.

Brian Huot, University of Louisville

Why have you chosen these specific pieces for your portfolio?
What makes these pieces interesting to you?
What surprises you about your work?
What would you do differently?

Eunice Greer; Harvard PACE; University of Illinois

What do you want people to learn about you from reading your portfolio?
Show me where or how they would learn those things from looking at your work.
What's something that you've been working to improve?
Trace your growth in that area through the collection of your work. (I want them to follow a thread of an idea through a series of works that have been built over time and read their portfolio as a single body of work, not as a random set of unrelated works.)

Nancie Atwell, Center for Teaching & Learning, Edgecomb, Maine

How many pieces of writing did you finish this semester?
What genres are represented among these pieces?
What's the most important or useful information about conventions of written English you've learned this semester?
What will you try to do in your writing in the future?

Judy Fueyo, Penn State University

If you think of your work according to "level of difficulty," what would you choose as hardest and why?
Please describe what you were trying to do, even if you did not achieve it.

The Reflexive Encounter

Questions that Encourage Representing the Self to an Other

Chris Sullivan, Plainville High School, Connecticut

Within the context of the overall picture of yourself that you are trying to create, what does this artifact show?
Think in terms of skills, knowledge, and personal impact as you answer. What does this piece tell you about your goal for this period of time?
Does it say you are getting there? Have to work on a certain skill? Need more evidence for evaluation?

Miles Myers, Executive Director; NCTE, Urbana, Illinois

If you are reflecting for personal reasons about your work, do you have a life or a school career pattern into which these reflections fit?
If you are trying to show someone else something about your reflections, how will you make these reflections visible and meaningful for the other person?

Linda Carstens, San Diego Unzjied School District, California

What should I know as a reader about this piece that will help me understand your thinking and work?
What would you do next to this piece to have it "tell your story" even more clearly?

Sara Jordan, SUNY Albany, New York

What do you want your work to say about you? What does your work say about you?

Tom Romano, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

What things can you show me about your learning that I would otherwise not know about you.

Running Records

Teachers use running records as a quick assessment tool to evaluate students' reading and comprehension. They are used to help find students' reading levels, check their fluency, and find weaknesses in comprehension.

Running records are conducted one-to-one by the teacher with the student. The materials needed are:

Various Leveled Books
Running Record Forms - to keep track of miscues and errors
Timer
Pencil
Calculator

As the child reads the text, the teacher follows along with a copy of the text or on a running record form (example above). Teachers note any errors, insertions etc.

The teacher will recognize if the text is TOO EASY or TOO DIFFICULT, in which case the session stops immediately. The student will need to be retested on a different level book.

If the student finishes reading the text, he can do a retell of the story or answer comprehension questions to help the teacher assess their comprehension.

Miscue Analysis : the teacher is assessing the errors made by the student

Types of Miscues	What they tell you
Correction: During the oral reading, the child realizes he/she has made an error and re-reads the section/word without prompting.	Correction: This is good! We want readers to self-correct. However is the reader reading too fast? Is the reader mis-correcting accurate reading? If so, the reader often doesn't see himself as a 'good' reader.
Insertion: As the child is reading, he/she will insert a word or two that isn't on the page	Insertion Does the inserted word detract from meaning? If not, it may just mean the reader is making sense but also inserts. The reader may also be reading too fast. If the insertion is something like using finished for finish, this should be addressed.
Omission: During the oral reading, the child leaves out a word(s.)	Omission: When words are omitted, it may mean weaker visual tracking. Determine if the meaning of the passage is affected or not. If not, omissions can also be the result of not focusing or reading too fast. It may also mean the sight vocabulary is weaker.
Repetition: A child repeats a word or portion of the text.	Repetition Lots of repetition may mean that the text level is too difficult. Sometimes readers repeat when they're uncertain and will repeat the word(s) to make sense of the passage.
Reversal: A child will reverse the order of the print or the word.	Reversal: Watch for altered meaning. Many reversals happen with young readers with high frequency words - of for for etc.
Substitution: Instead of reading a specific word, the child inserts a different word. info about miscues from Sue Watson	Substitutions: Sometimes a child will use a substitution because they don't understand the word being read. Does the substitution make sense in the passage, is it a logical substitution?

The Reading and Writing Processes: A Comparison

When students understand the similarities between the reading and writing processes, they begin to see the natural flow that exists as they read what others write, and re-read to revise their own writing. Sounds simple enough, right? But when I explained these comparisons to high school kids, I witnessed their AH HA moments and positive changes in their reading and writing habits.

chart info from Literacy in the 21st Century, 5th ed. by Gail Tompkins.

8 principles for effective teaching of Reading

Effective teachers

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information from Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach, 5th ed. 2010.

Bonding vs. Loving with Support

Bonding	Loving
Ensure success for every child	Affirm their strengths
Model respect	Through my behaviors I show compassion and courtesy toward every student through encouraging words and creation of a safe haven; building trust from day one.
Encourage shared decision making	Empower students by collaborating with them, not dictating to them
Bring in stories	Share successes, disappointments, and failures with my students: by opening myself to my students, I show them I trust them with my life stories. I cannot expect them to share themselves, if I do not model the behavior
Get to know students as readers	Interview my students individually to learn about their reading attitudes and aptitudes
Enjoy the students in your class	Laugh with them, cry with them, share with them, be joyous with them, show them you are delighted to be their teacher.
Celebrate life	Love life, relish learning, be passionate about reading and other aspirations

Ways to support bonding in the classroom:

Converse with students about what is important to them; even what they fear
Ask them for their advice and opinions
Create a loving, trusting, respectful and tolerant environment
Champion your students.
Don’t lecture to them; share with them
Write together
Read together
Laugh together
Model the behaviors you desire your students to exhibit

Summer Learning is Important to Student Success

Summer Learning is Important to Student Success :

"... Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement. And the alarming thing is: that loss is cumulative. More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college. By middle school, many kids will be hopelessly behind, putting the chance of entering college or even graduating from high school at risk."

'via Blog this'

Most Read Books

There have been many comments about this graphic: some question the notion of "read" vs. "printed" while some say that books in a series should not be lumped together (i.e., Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings). What are your thoughts?

Methods for Language Teaching

Approaches and Methods for Language Teaching

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Free Technology for Teachers: What About Me? - Create an Infographic About Yourself

Free Technology for Teachers: What About Me? - Create an Infographic About Yourself:
Applications for Education
What About Me? could be a good tool for getting students to look at their social media footprints. This could be particularly important for high school students applying to college as well as for students looking for jobs. Have students create an infographic to analyze what they're sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

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March is Women's History Month

Put the power of primary sources to work in the classroom. Browse ready-to-use lesson plans, student activities, collection guides and research aids.

Visit this website from The Library of Congress for Women's History Month

Learning Strategies

Whatever the strategies emphasized, learned, and used, it is generally agreed that they should be taught through explicit instruction, careful modeling, and scaffolding.

Mentally active learners are better learners
Learning strategies can be taught
Learning strategies transfer to new tasks
Academic language learning is more effective with learning strategies

from The SIOP Model by Jana Echevarria, MaryEllen Vogt, and Deborah J. Short

Word of the Day: Suggestopedia

suggest.html

Key Elements of Suggestopedia

Some of the key elements of Suggestopedia include a rich sensory learning environment (pictures, colour, music, etc.), a positive expectation of success and the use of a varied range of methods: dramatised texts, music, active participation in songs and games, etc.
Suggestopedia adopts a carefully structured approach, using four main stages as follows:

Presentation
A preparatory stage in which students are helped to relax and move into a positive frame of mind, with the feeling that the learning is going to be easy and fun.
First Concert - "Active Concert"
This involves the active presentation of the material to be learnt. For example, in a foreign language course there might be the dramatic reading of a piece of text, accompanied by classical music.
Second Concert - "Passive Review"
The students are now invited to relax and listen to some Baroque music, with the text being read very quietly in the background. The music is specially selected to bring the students into the optimum mental state for the effortless acquisition of the material.
Practice
The use of a range of games, puzzles, etc. to review and consolidate the learning.

Enable students to take control of their learning

While the teacher provides the necessary instruction, modeling, and support, the students work to develop the metacognitive skills necessary for independent problem solving.

from: Mastering ESL and Bilingual Methods by Socorro G. Herrera and Kevin G. Murry

ASCD Inservice: Every Child, Every Day

ASCD Inservice: Every Child, Every Day:
"Examine the literacy activities that struggling readers in your school experience every day. Do all of them spend at least two-thirds of their reading and writing lessons actually reading and writing? Or do they spend larger amounts of time on specific skill-work activities, and little time reading and writing?

When struggling readers interact with texts all day long, in science and social studies lessons, for instance, do they read with 98% accuracy or higher -- or do they struggle with reading accuracy, then fluency, and finally comprehension? What are students learning about language and literacy in settings where they have an uninterrupted diet of challenging texts?

Ask yourself:

Are the adults in our school making decisions that create struggling readers?
Are instructional systems and uses of time designed to ensure the activities recommended above? If not, what is in their place?
What am I going to do to ensure that every child spends most of every day in high-quality, literate, learning environments?"

'via Blog this'

When a child creates

When a child creates with blocks, when he communicates with paint, when he uses his body freely as a means of expression, he is being taught to read.

J Hymes, 1965

Building Bridges

Building Bridges with Multicultural Literature: African Refugees

View more presentations from Lori Berghe.

Brothers in Hope

Sharing our stories helps us to understand our common humanity. Whether there is a picture book to peer into or a voice that brings the action to life, children of all ages long for a story vividly told.

The week before Thanksgiving 2011, I had the pleasure of visiting the Macedonia Family Resource Center (MFRC) in High Point, NC which helps underserved refugee parents in the area improve their literacy and life skills while also assisting their children for success in school through structured tutoring sessions.

During that tour of the MFRC, I met four children ages 7 – 11 who came to America from war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East. I chose these books with those youngsters in mind with the hope of sharing the stories with them upon a future visit to the Community Center.

However, High Point, NC is not an isolated area where families such as these are in need of assimilation skills and support. The lessons I am including here are for students in Grade 3.

Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan

Mary Williams (Author)

R. Gregory Christie (Illustrator)

Publisher: Lee & Low Books

Reading Level : Ages 7 and Up

ISBN-10: 1584302321

Coretta Scott King Award Winner

Summary: This is a fictional story about Garang, an eight year old boy who tends cattle for his father in Southern Sudan. One day while tending the herd, Civil War breaks out and Garang’s village is pummeled with bullets. He runs to hide under the cover of the forest. After the shooting stops, Garang returns to his village and finds everyone gone. He begins to wander the road away from his home and meets other boys who could not find their families. Many, many boys were on the road; the oldest were fifiteen. They had to learn to care for one another as they left Sudan and crossed into Ethiopia for safety. Many boys did not survive the journey. They were lucky to find a refugee camp to stay for a while, but then war broke out in Ethopia and they were forced to walk into Kenya. The boys grew older in the camp in Kenya, but life was hard there too. Finally, the United States offered the 3800 Sudanese Lost Boys a home.

Response: The fact that we have so many displaced families who have fled wartorn countries in our own communities is enough reason to share this book with students. The author is careful to word the facts of death in such a way that will not scare the young, but will open a discussion about the trials and suffering those in the situations face. Some students may feel compelled to share their own stories. But as the title says, this is a story of hope; it is also a story of faith, courage, and love. In Garang’s father’s words: “Your heart and mind are strong. There is nothing you cannot do.” This story will open opportunities to talk about how education, faith, determination, and hope in the future are a part of all our lives.

Suggested Use in the Classroom: This book fits nicely as an interdisciplinary lesson in social studies and language arts as illustrated below:

Are Ebooks Any Good?

"When Julie Hume, a reading specialist in University City, MO, first saw the potential of a children’s ebook, it was larger than life. The book was projected on a smartboard at the front of a classroom, with huge, easily readable words, brilliant graphics, and an engaging recorded-voice narrator. A teacher trainer stood nearby, demonstrating to Hume and other reading specialists how to pause the narration to point to artwork on the page and ask students questions about what they were hearing."

Developing Language and Literacy

Web Poster Wizard

This FREE tool allows educators to create a lesson, worksheet, or class page and immediately publish it online. Teachers can also set up classes and assign projects to students. Students complete the assignments by creating their own online projects or reports. Teachers and students can even add images and links to their pages.