Monday, April 26, 2010
Loop de Loop
Thursday, April 15, 2010
It's about the journey...
In my district each year we are asked to create an ILP (Individualized Learning Plan). This ILP is basically an outline of goals we are looking to meet, in order to make ourselves better teachers. In September, I started the school year, with Daily Five in my hands, like an eager child ready for their first day of school. I had my materials but then had to think, what are my goals to achieve with these materials? Although there were an endless amount of goals I could set forth for myself, my two main focuses were, "Engaging Students in Learning" and "Reflecting on my teaching". These two goals are at the heart of Daily Five. At the end of the school year, we are asked to reflect on our ILP and how it has help to improve student learning along with our own professional growth. Below is my ILP reflection.
The students in my classroom had opportunities throughout the school year to initiate choice and create individual goals for themselves. With my guidance they were encouraged to create goals for themselves and choose the necessary strategies they would need to meet these goals.
With student choice, each student was motivated to achieve their goals and took ownership of their learning. Learning was purposeful for each student. This was evident through student-teacher conversations, classroom discussions and classroom activities. During Daily Five students choose between Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listening to Reading, Word Work, and Work on Writing. With this choice I saw an increase in students stamina for the choice they choose and also an understanding of why they were choosing that particular activity and/or reading strategy. This in turn then led to self-motivation. For example, students would pick “Work on Writing” if they knew they had to catch up on a writing assignment and wanted time to do so outside of our writing block. Students who picked “Read to Someone”, often picked this choice if they were working on Fluency. While other students choose “Listening to Reading” in order to work on and monitor their reading comprehension.
Through classroom discussions and conferences students were able to express their learning growth and even create their own reading goals. When thinking about student engagement and ownership of learning, a conversation I had with one particular student comes to mind. This student asked me for a reading conference because he wanted to discuss his reading goal and strategy. When we sat down for our conference I asked him why he wanted a conference. He said, “ I wanted to conference with you because my reading strategy is choosing a good fit book and I don’t think that is a good strategy for me right now.” When I asked him why he said, “ because we are reading our biography books right now and I won’t be able to practice choosing a good fit fiction book.” I then asked him if he had a reading strategy in mind and he said, “I think the one Joe has would be good for me, because it is cause and effect. Joe said he picked this strategy because Martin Luther King effected our world and so did Jackie Robinson.” This conversation showed me many things. His conference showed me this student was taking ownership of his learning, understood the reading strategies, and also was learning a lot from working with and discussing reading strategies with other students in the classroom.
Along with reading instructions, the students in my classroom also had choice in other subject areas, such as math. Due to the positive results I was seeing from Daily Five and CAFÉ, I also implemented Daily Math. During Daily Math students had the opportunity to choose from different daily activities, such as Math by Myself and math games. Each day students’ choose “Math by Myself” with the choice of completing the LAB book pages with my assistance or by themselves. It was extremely interesting to see how in tune the children were with their learning abilities. During Daily Math we had two rounds, allowing the kids one round to do “Math by Myself” and one round of games. The children choose games that they felt would benefit their learning, such as multiplication fact fluency or sums of ten.
In addition to engaging students in learning I also choose to reflect on my teaching. This past school year I reflected on my teaching in many different ways. This reflection included blogs, emails with another teacher who is in her first year of implementing Daily Five, Think Tank sessions with five teachers from various Long Island school districts, discussions on Proteacher.org and feedback from the students. Reflecting on my teaching has helped me tremendously. My reflections have been honest and allowed for me to grow as a classroom teacher. Throughout the school year I constantly re-evaluated my teaching practices and made sure that the teaching I did was individualized meaningful for each student. Daily Five, CAFÉ, and Daily Math have all helped me to individualize classroom instruction and master the management of small group work while implementing purposeful learning activities. Reflecting on these activities and my teaching allowed me to realize no one is perfect and with those imperfections we grow. As I say to my students each day, “It is about the journey that we take to get the destination, not about the destination itself.” This year has truly been a wonderful journey, and if I’m considering becoming “distinguished” in my ILP goals of “Engaging students in learning” and “Reflecting on my teaching” as my destination, I think I’ve definitely arrived. It is quite the opposite. I have now carved the path for many other journeys to occur, and goals to be met.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Shavasana...
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Did you get better at reading and writing today?
In the world of reading and writing there is all this buzz of teaching students in either small groups or 1:1 conferencing. Whole group instruction is no longer beneficial for student learning. So now in many classrooms we have strategy groups, guided reading groups, words their way groups, math groups, etc. groups. All this grouping of children is wonderful in a perfect world, with all the time in the world to prep for these small group instructions, but that perfect world doesn’t exist. Or does it, in a room that utilizing Daily 5.
I say Daily Five and CAFE are my saviors because they are the best classroom management tools I have implemented in my classroom. Both are effective ways to manage my classroom day and information being taught. I know Daily Five is here to stay in my classroom.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The moans finally came...
Friday, December 11, 2009
Those were the days...
Daily Five and CAFÉ are great ways to keep things moving in the classroom and engage our students in learning. In CAFÉ 48 we’ve been spending time reminding our students about the correct Daily Five behaviors and how to stay on track, while there mind may be somewhere else… inner voice anyone? (Hmmm…. presents… new videos games, etc. and my teacher really wants me to sit hear and write a story!). I think I just thought of a great mini-lesson for next week!
I have to be honest, just like the student’s, I have gotten in to my own routine and allowed both Daily Five and CAFÉ to become somewhat robotic. I know I need to motivate myself and enhance my mini-lessons in order to keep the children engaged. But how…?????
Well first, as I said I’ve gone back to the beginning. We’ve started modeling our behaviors and remembering back to when Daily Five was the best time of our day. The days in September when my students would sit down on the carpet, before me having to tell them to do so and their eagerness to learn was contagious. The days when all I could talk about was Daily Five, CAFÉ, and the amazing results I was seeing in my classrooms.
Ah, those were the days… and I need them back!!!!!!!
In the upcoming weeks leading up to the holiday break, I will reflect on the past few months. Here are a few of my reflection questions. Join me and reflect on your own experience….
What worked and what didn’t?
What have the kids learned and what still needs to be learned?
How can I keep the excitement going?
Should I change the “A” for Accuracy to Awareness of genres? (A suggestion from a PT user).
Where do literature circles fit into daily five?
Keeping choice while also meeting the demands of independent work.
Re-visiting and creating mini-lessons for good-fit books.
Creating new reading goals
Happy holidays!!!!
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Buzz…Buzz…Buzz…
I am a walking advertisement for Daily Five and CAFÉ. Whenever I speak with other teachers the conversation always lends itself to talking about Daily Five and/or CAFÉ. Sadly for the others it is usually because they mention that they don’t have enough time in there day to fit everything in. Well, anyone who is doing Daily Five knows that comment is an invitation for advertisement. Not only do I fit everything in, my teaching is also purposeful and tapping into the needs of every student in my classroom.
In the last two weeks we have had four visitors in Café 48 who came in to observe the Daily Five. Each visitor left extremely impressed and all I could say was read the book and you too will be able to experience the success we are having in our classroom. That’s it! No hidden secrets. It is attainable for any and all teachers and classrooms.
Now that my gloating is done I’ll get into the nitty gritty of my past two weeks...
As I mentioned in my last blog my focus for the past 2 weeks was “context clues” and “getting to know your characters”. For context clues we learned two strategies, 1) read the words before and after the new word, 2) use your prior knowledge to help with the meaning of the word. A great book for context clues is The Boy Who Loved Words. This book is perfect for talking about interesting words. In addition to this book I also made copies of 3 short articles regarding the USA. We are currently learning about the USA and it was a perfect way to combine reading and Social Studies. Each child was given 3 short articles with new vocabulary words underlined. After reading the articles together (1 in each mini-lesson round), I then made a 2-column context clue chart. The first column was labeled New Word and the second column was titled Context Clue. The students loved pretending to be detectives!
Along with Context Clues we have been “getting to know Edward Tulane”. This is by far the most PERFECT book for teaching character traits and character development. During Edward Tulane’s Miraculous Journey he is owned by many different owners, each of whom give him a different name and circumstances lead him to develop new emotions in each chapter. The possibilities for lessons to teach with this book are endless. So far we have learned about character traits, character development, interesting words, and next week we will be discussing cause and effect. We will analyze the different experiences that he has and the effects they have on him. While reading the book we created a flow chart. Each time Edward Tulane became a new character or gained a new emotion we charted it. When we finish the book we will use this chart to help us analyze the experiences Edward Tulane had and how they affected him.
I seriously don’t want this book to end and either do my kids! Today when we were talking about the book my student teacher said she was so excited to read the next chapter to find out what happens next. One kid chimed in and said, “I don’t want to read the next chapter because that means we will be closer to the end and I don’t want the book to ever end!” I am racking my brain trying to think of the next read aloud. It is SO hard! A challenge lies ahead of me trying to find a comparable book to Edward Tulane and The Secret Garden. Any suggestions?????
Next weeks goals are to chart one or two strategies on the CAFÉ board. I was doing so well with this in the beginning and then lately I’ve noticed that I have not kept up with adding new strategies. I think the reason for this is that we are spending more time on one strategy. This being said I still think it is important to add a new strategy once a week in order to keep things fresh.
Daily Math is moving along. We still have only introduced Math with Someone (Games) and Math with the Teacher. The past two days we managed to get through three rounds. The kids are doing well but I need to slow down a bit and take the time to model the correct and incorrect behaviors. We need to work on whisper voices (very hard when kids are playing games! The excitement gets the best of them :-))
Have a great weekend!
Words of Advice:
Read the book Edward Tulane (you must have seen this one coming!). It is truly an unbelievable read aloud!!!