Meeting with Jayne

As part of my grad school work, I along with other Shakopee Saint Mary's students, recently met with Jayne to aks questions about curriculum and how it works in our district. It was interesting to hear how everything with our curriculum came to be. She discussed the curriculum process and what is done at the various levels. Jayne wears many hats in our district, and is amazing at what she does!!

End of the Year

I always try to stay ahead as the end of the year approaches, but am finding this very difficult to do! I have finished DRA's, put the scores in, and am currently working on report cards, but am still feeling a little overwhelmed!! I suppose I get this feeling at the end of every year, but I want to make sure I get done everything earlier, so I can relax a little at the end! It is a busy May!!

Asperger's Syndrome

At the Autism Conference, I had the opportunity to see a documentary called, "Today's Man: Striving Toward Independence". It was a documentary written by a woman whose brother has Asperger's Syndrome. She chronicled his life from birth until the present time. She followed the family's journey through diagnosis until now, when he is 32 years old and still living at home. Then, after the film, the sister and brother came out and answered questions and gave a talk. The boy, Nikky, was hilarious and very open and honest. The bottom line of the talk was that there are not that many options for people with Asperger's after the age of 21. There are not group homes for people who are teetering on the edge of having to live with someone but possibly could be independent with support. The are so many challenges for these individuals. Nikky mentioned that he goes to social skills groups that are led by individuals whose children have autism. He mentioned that he has a hard time holding a job due to the schedules he needs to keep and his rigidity. He does not read social cues very well and some of these situations were displayed in the film. It was the most endearing talk that I have ever been to and it made me so happy that I have chosen to work in the field of special education!

2011 Minnesota Autism Conference

I attended the Annual Minnesota Autism Conference last week. I heard the keynote speaker presentation that was led by Dr. James Coplan. He was an amazing speaker who introduced a three-dimensional model of ASD that looks at the level each student is at; their IQ and their age. He explained that the combination of these three areas is what drives how people should treat autism. He had so many visuals that helped parents and educators understand the significance of what he was saying.

One thing that he mentioned that was interesting was that he believes that there has not been an explosion of diagnoses of autism over the past few years. Through studies that have been done on adults, there are just as many adults who have autism as children. However, the adults were not diagnosed until later in life. Educators and doctors just did not know how to diagnosis autism many years ago.

I sat next to a couple who are special education teachers and who have a son with autism who is 13. They both mentioned that the information presented that night was so helpful and comforting to parents of children with autism. I asked them if it was difficult to teach special needs children all day and then go home to their son who has many needs. Their answer surprised me. They said that their training has been extremely helpful in how to deal with their son's behaviors; how to communicate with the school system; and how to find the necessary resources to help them.

May Post

It is that time of year when I am reviewing my professional goal. This year I was focused on taking purposeful and useful anecdotal records for reading/writing. I feel that I used many resources this year, including people in the building, to help me find the most efficient and useful resources for documents and how I take my notes. I found two very useful forms- individual student record keeping and a strategy group form that worked very well for me, especially when I wanted to go back and look at my notes. I do feel that there are things I will do next year to adjust and make my anecdotal records even more useful.

Belated April Post

This time of year, I am reviewing many of the reading strategies/comprehension skills we focused on throughout the year. I am amazed when I try to summarize and pick areas where I know we need more review or re-teaching, all that we cover and teach our students in one year. It is rewarding to see when students are beginning to really apply those skills and be successful.

April Book Study

Beth and I recently met to disccuss a couple chapter in the book, Research Based Methods of reading Instruction. Much of the material in the book was consisent with what we already do in kindergarten, however, I found some great ideas for learning centers. For example, they had some great ideas for segmenting which you could do with letter tiles and sound boxes.

May Post

As we are beginning to come to the end of the school year already.. CRAZY, I wanted to take a look back at my professional development goal and reflect on how I felt this goal progressed throughout the year. My goal was related to my anacdotal records and really using them to plan strategy and guided reading groups and use them better to drive my instruction. I feel like I did accomplish most of my goal throughout the year. Kristin and I were able to make some really helpful notes as we read with students which then allowed us to meet every few weeks to develop small groups with students that were focused on the skills that we noticed needed practice. This worked really well for us this year and I felt much better about what I was writing down for my notes and about the skill that was going to be the focus in each group. I felt like the students had a better idea of their objective and I was really able to key in on those strategies that we were teaching in the small group settings. Of course there is always room for improvement and now it will be designing and finding a bigger of variety of lessons to teach with each skill focus.

April Autism Meeting

Last week, I attended an autism support group with my husband, and mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with Asberger's, so we wanted to support her and learn better ways to accommodate and work with her. The support group was lead by a psychologist, with many participant's having Asberger's. It was really neat to hear everyone talk about their experiences with Asberger's and see how it affects their lives on a daily basis. While some participants you would never know had asberger's, others were very low functioning. There seemed to be a huge range of people with Asberger's at the meeting. One common theme was that most participants said they have strict schedules, and they don't do well with changes in their schedules.

I gained a ton of insight on certain traits and characteristics that my mother-in-law has which appear to be directly linked to Asberger's. Having a better understanding of Asberger's will not only help me in working with my mother-in-law, but also with students in my classroom. I am eager to learn more about Autism through attending other workshops, seminars, and meetings.

Book Study

I read one chapter out of the book, "Research-based Methods of Reading Instruction, Grade K-3". The chapter focused on phonemic awareness. It was interesting to read this in light of the previous article I had read about how reading should be taught through subjects of interest. This book mentions that "one of the best predictions of how well students will learn to read during their first two years of school is phonemic awareness". I understand why that would be the foundation of reading while the books of interest would be the individual building blocks. If one does not know the individual letters or phonemes, how can they learn how to blend to form words?

This chapter also discussed how teaching these skills can be done in 15-20 minutes per day. An interesting fact that was shared was that students in small groups transfer their phonemic awareness skills to reading better than students in a whole class or one-on-one. I can see that having at least one other student in the group would be beneficial. I have one group that I am working on these skills with and they are models for each other. With this particular group, I spend 10 minutes each day working on a vowel sound and then we read a book of interest that has words with that vowel sound (e.g. short a and then we read a book that focuses on words with short a sounds). It is working very well. They get very excited when they can read these words or at least recognize the pattern.

who really drives the curriculum??

Life is kinda funny, the way some things correlate. Last week we had an in service on the new standards and this week in my Masters class we debated who really drives the curriculum. We had to list (in order) the following people on a mountain: teachers, students, parents, curriculum committee, principal, school board, publishers, national government, and something else I can't remember (oops). Anyway, it was really interesting to see how others ranked their mountains. I ranked teachers on the top, while others say national government (my teacher agreed with me;)). My reason for this, is as such. At the end of the day, we close our classroom doors and we have the control; we ultimately decide how and what we teach. Hopefully we all realize that we do have a moral and ethical code to teach what we are suppose to! The debate was rather interesting. Just something to think about!

Nikki

Phonics

I have been doing a new phonics based activity with my intervention students every week and I would be happy to share with anyone who is interested. I will try to explain as well as I can. Basically, they each get a sheet that has a bunch of words on it that all have the same chunks. For example, this week their words all have AT and ATE. They go through and highlight the chunks first, then go through and just quickly say each chunk throughout the whole page and then the last time, they go through and say the entire word. The hope is that they will get faster at this every day and they will begin to notice the chunks and sounds as readers and pull them out of words. I know that Kristin also tried this with a child she was tutoring and he did awesome! He then applied it to his reading and was really pulling out chunks and entire sounds instead of stretching out words sound by sound. Sometimes, I time the students or tap my hand to give them a beat too. Just an idea!

Standards-Based IEP Inservice

I was a little skeptical when we had our workshop on Friday morning about the new Standards-Based IEP. My initial feeling was that this was creating a lot more work for us when writing our IEPs. However, we received many useful guides with templates on how to write them as well as packets with the Math and Reading Standards. When writing an IEP this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised at how useful this new method is for writing the Present Level of Performance as well as the goals and objectives. I felt that I had a better overall idea of how the student is functioning and where we need him/her to be for the next year. I think that it will make things clearer for the parents as wellk. Even though it took longer to write the IEP, it was definitely easier to do so!

Once Again!

I have been very frustrated this week while administering MAP tests to my students. All of them have had a difficult time putting words in alphabetical order as well as determining the beginning and ending sounds of words. The alphabetical order is something that I definitely thought that they would be able to do. It is especially difficult for them to put the words in order if all the words begin with the same letter. The one positive thing that the testing has taught me is that I need to focus some of my teaching time on this topic. Sometimes, the most simple skill is overlooked. I have gleaned a lot of other important skills that need to be either taught or retaught.

Rhyming

I did an exercise with a couple of my kindergarten students this morning on the topic of rhyming. I have little houses with a different picture on the top of each one. The students have to choose a card from a pile and figure out which house it belongs in (or which word it rhymes with). The words have some of the following sounds- "ing", "ed", "ale", "at". It was interesting to follow both student's thought processes. One student could not grasp the concept of the ending of each word having to match. He was only focusing on the beginning sounds. After doing that, I read a Dr. Seuss book to them and they had to raise their hands when they heard rhyming words. The student who grasped it better with the words in isolation did not understand the words in context. It is so hard to figure out how else to teach these concepts. They just don't hear the sounds that are alike.

April

We recently took a field trip to the Holasek Greenery in Chaska. What a great learning experince this was for students! The best part was it was free! The students learned all about the process of planting seeds, what plants need to grow, and they learned about many different flowers and plants! Today in the classroom we did some interactive writing about our fieldtrip experience and I was amazed at all the students responses! We will defintely be going back next year!

Article Review

I just finished reading an article from the American Educator magazine entitled "Sparks Fade, Knowledge Stays". It discussed the findings from a report written by the National Early Literacy Panel that stated that the key to learning how to read is knowledge of phonological awareness and phonics. The authors of the article agreed that these components were important but there were many other factos to consider. Code-based interventions are necessary but the area that we are missing (especially with kids who struggle) is teaching the desire to learn. The authors feel that kids want to become experts in different areas (e.g. whales, dinosaurs, etc) and this, more than learning letters and sounds, drives their ambition to come to school to learn. "Knowledge is the headline star, and conventional literacy skills are the supporting cast members." Through many studies that were done, these authors found that background knowledge was extremely important when reading and answering comprehension questions. One study had a combination of soccer experts and novices read a story about soccer and had them memorize details, make inferences and detect basic contradictions (the story included some facts that were not true). The experts were found to have done far better than their peers who did not have the same background knowledge. What they also found was that "the high-and-low aptitude experts did not differ from one another". Also, "high-aptitude novices did no better than the low-aptitude novices". This article has been very eye-opening to me as a special education teacher. I spend so much time working on individual skills but sometimes neglect to also look at the big picture of reading. As it is stated in the article, "code and content learning must be emphasized simultaneously".

SPRING IS HERE!!

Hello, Wow! I can't believe it is the start of the 4th quarter already! Time flies when we are having fun. I must say that I am very impressed with my classes behavior upon their return. I was expecting wild and crazy, but they are focused and rested. It's awesome! Well, as we all know with spring time comes testing time. I have been working with strategy groups on test taking skills and best practices. We have been working on highlighting passages, read the questions first, and eliminating choices. Does anyone have any other strategies, techniques, or tips they are willing to share? Nikki

April

It is good to be back after a refreshing and rejuvenating Spring Break. I have been very happy with how well my students have been doing this week. I have not seen much regression in most of them. Over break, I had the opportunity to observe a special education teacher at my son's school, Glendale Elementary. I observed students in the SPED room and then had the chance to see them as well in the mainstream classroom. ISD 719 purchased an amazing curriculum for teaching reading and writing to students with learning disabilities. It is a comprehensive curriculum to covers word work, vocabulary, writing and reading. The students really responded to it and the teachers enjoyed having a curriculum that is comprehensive and that follows the students throughout their elementary school years. It is always nice to see what others teachers are doing. The curriculum was fast-paced enough to grab the attention of students with ADHD and it included lessons for the SMART BOARD so it was not just a paper-pencil curriculum.

April Already?!

Hello All, I can't believe how fast this year has been going. It was great to have Spring Break and I feel ready to be back here and focused. The big testing is coming up next week. As a 4th grade team, we have worked hard to meet the needs of the students who are not on grade level. We had a chance to create strategy groups based on their needs and help for reading. I found it extremely useful to have my kids split into groups. We have used passages to help them 1. Practice Highlighting key vocabulary 2. Pay attention to underlined words 3. Review story elements 4. Focus on literal, inferental, interpretative and evaluative questions 5. Pay attention to vocabulary in context. I have split my 9 students into two groups. I am able to see by modeling, working in small groups and independently that students are getting correct answers at a higher rate. Also their confidence has improved with using the skills taught. Even though testing is a challenge, I feel that this has been a rewarding experience!

March Blog

This was meant to get out before Spring Break, so I'm a little late! I am glad to see that my students are refreshed and ready to learn again after Spring Break! I was getting a little frustrated before break with students that weren't working to their capability. Some of my higher students started writing only one sentence when they could write more. Further, they seemed to be rushing through work quicker. I don't know that it was me pushing them to hard, or just plain "checking out". maybe a combination of both! Today, they seemed to be back on track. However, it is only day one back from break. We will see what happens in the following weeks!

March Blog

Happy End of 3rd Quarter!! The strategy groups that Kristin and I reorganize every few weeks is continuing to work really well for us. One of the challenges that I am wondering about involves comprehension and those higher readers. In first grade, once students really understand "how" to read then we really dive deeper into comprehension and inferential thinking. Does anyone have any great mini lessons or ideas on this? Especially those of you at the higher grade levels. Our higher readers are great "readers"...they know all of the words and can read fluently, but it is very hard for them to apply some of those inferential and complex thinking skills to their reading. It's hard for them to understand how to slow down and really pay attention to what they read. Thanks Everyone!

Happy Spring!

Hard to believe it is already the end of third quarter! The past few weeks I have been really focused on MCA prep with my 3rd graders as it is their first time taking the MCA's. As a team, we created skill and activity work based off of the questions we knew would have more focus on the tests. It seems to be working well teaching the mini-lesson/skill as a whole group and then having students complete some independently. This has given me the opportunity to work with various small groups further on the skills, as needed. This has been different than my other guided reading groups, but fits with our mini-lessons and student's needs currently. I have also found that students who I thought might have been more confident in a skill are not as much when they are practicing it in more of a formal/test-like scenario.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Hello All,

Well, I can tell it is close to spring break. I am in my second year of a loop, and it is beginning to show in my class. By the time the kids walk through the door, they are already bickering at one another. HUGH!! It is frustrating. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Also, I am doing book clubs at the beginning of 4Th quarter. If you know of any good read aloud, I would appreciate the input.

Finally, I am happy to report that my reading intervention with one of my students is a success. I am applying the neurological impress method, to help him with his fluency. It really seems to be helping him. He is much more fluent and confident in his reading! YEAH!!!

Nikki

March Blog

I have been using the Sonday reading system with some of my students this year. It has been a struggle for these students to both sound out each of the letters in a word and then to blend them together. I finally had a break through with one of these students this week. She is one student who could state the letter sounds but then would say a word that was not even close when blending the sounds together. She all of a sudden started to blend the words correctly last week! It was an "ah-huh" moment for her! Her confidence is higher now that she can read the words, and she is much more willing to try new words now that she has experienced success.

Late Work

Hi,

Does anyone else have students who think it is okay NOT to hand work in? I have students who continuously do not hand in their work. I make modifications for these students when necessary, but still...nothing. I have an HP student who doesn't hand stuff in. I have tried keeping them in for recess, sending the work home, and talking to parents. Does anyone have any suggestions? And also, when/or do we draw the line at some point. This is a issue in my class this quarter and I was wondering if anyone had any insight.

Nikki

March Post

One of my goals this year is to take and make my reading binder data and anecdotal notes purposeful in my instruction planning. I also set a goal to try to meet with students "formally" more about their independent book. I found students were sharing with me often throughout the day about their books but then I was not taking as many notes and getting to meet with them as often for conferring. I have now been trying to meet with 1-2 students a day about their books and recording meaningful data. This has helped me when planning mini-lessons and books talks to meet student's needs.

Extra Post

I participated last month in my first I love to Read Night. I did a reader's theater with 3 of my teammates and one other teacher. I really enjoyed the experience of reading aloud to students from different grade levels and sharing a passion for books. I was surprised that not more students and their families attended this event. How many years has this event been going on? I do look forward to participating in the years to come.

Belated February Post

I have been working on using the assessments that I am already giving and making it purposeful when planning guided reading groups, mini-lessons and strategy groups. After winter MAP testing, I looked at the 4 strands for reading. I found that I could focus on the strand word recognition/vocabulary. I then explored this area further on the NWEA website to find out some skills in this area I could focus more on. I found prefixes/suffixes, root words, and using context clues, to be three areas I could focus more on in class. I plan to use these lessons in whole and small group.

March Post

Hello Bloggers,
This is my monthly post. I am still working on giving continual feedback to my students. One area that is challenging to grade is book club discussions. Last quarter, I came up with a rubric to help students better understand their roles. If you would like a copy of it let me know (because I do not know how to attach papers to this blog). It is broken into multiple scores including if they come to book club prepared. I have also left room for me to make some comments about their participation and discussion.
I have found this to be extremely useful in grading and providing feedback to students.
Also, when I notice a group struggling, I have them rate themeselves and how well they think book club went. It is really interesting to note how they often are very honest or critical of their own preformance.
The book club books this month are:
Gossmer
Leepike Ridge
Charlotte's Web
Punished.
What else do you do to provide feedback in readers workshop?
What resources have been helpful for you?
What do you do to support the groups with difficulty discussing?

Hello

To be completely honest, I struggle with this whole blogging thing. For some reason, when I sit in front of the computer to blog, my mind goes blank! I just don't get it. I have a lot to say, just ask my team!! ;)

I had a math meeting yesterday. It was really interesting to hear what 3rd and 5th grade think about the new curriculum. It seems that almost everyone is starting to appreciate it. I think that next year and in the years that follow, it is going to be great for the kids. We just need to hang in there a little longer.

Conference week...my brain is fried!

Nikki

February Blog

So, I have been trying a new chunking activity with some of my lower readers and my intervention students in the afternoon. I have been making up little half sheets of words that have chunks that we have been focusing on in reading and spelling. For example, the whole sheet may be on the AR sound. The students go through and highlight the AR in every word and then say the sound every time. Then we go through and read the entire word. It amazes me how challenging this is for the students to remember these sounds and pull out the chunks, even when they are repeated over and over and over. It just made me realize that these students don't use this strategy as readers and that is part of the struggle they have with reading. Just thought I would share, I am happy to show anyone these half sheets if it easier to understand by seeing a visual!

February: ON TOP OF THIS!

Hello All,
I don't remember if I shared this or not but Nikki expressed that sometimes it's hard to remember to post. SO now every time we have FASTT Math I come here and update and post. It seems to be working well!
I am going to try that easy way to mark students that Katie shared. NP, P, M seems like a super easy way to keep up.
I also liked that the 3rd grade team had a chance to come and observe 4th grade. I would really like the chance to see what goes on in other classrooms as well!

January POST! Not so far behind now!

Wow, can't believe it is already Janurary.
This past week, I have been meeting with each one of my students. The purpose is to set up goals for 3rd quarter. I have used MAP goal descripters to help me focus my meetings with the student.
1.I started by reviewing their previous goals from 2nd quarter. Where they successful? I had them reflect orally and in their notebooks.
2. I printed their goal descriptors for MAP reading. We took a look a their strengths (in bold) and I praised them. We also looked at their weaknesses (in italics) and set one goal for 3rd quarter based on what we saw.
3. I had them record their goals in their new response notebooks and I recorded them in my antecodal records.
Every time I confer with them, I plan on using them to help me direct the conference or at least to mention and record how they are doing!

December POST !

Hello All,
Yes, I know this says DECEMBER but I am far behind so I have some catching up to do!
It is now February but I am trying to accomplish a lot.
My goal is still weekly feedback and to be better at conferring with students. While working on my goal, I found this article.
It really just reaffirms what I already do: which makes me feel good.
Think about asking these questions to students when you confer with them.
Is this book JR? What are you working on as a reader? How can you help you meet your goals? Are there an questions you have as a reader? What are you going to work on next?
The only issue for me is time. Most students can talk and talk and I feel so limited with the time I have for them. My goal is 4 readers a day to meet with but it sometimes is only 1-2. How do you fit it in? Is it ok to meet with only one if the conversation is quality? Is that fair to the other readers?

January Blog

Of course, I am late again on my January blog!!! Sorry everyone! Kristin and I just quickly assessed each student on their reading level. We used the reading a-z passages which correlate pretty well to the DRA levels. They are short and are following by 5 comprehension questions. This was much quicker and more efficient than giving everyong a DRA half way through the year. Now we are going to look at the notes that we made and the levels to design some new strategy groups and focus in on some specific skills. Just an idea for people for a quick assessment!

January 2011

Hi,

My New Year's Resolution is to become more organized and more timely with my blogging. I apologize for my sporadic posts. I have had trouble with posting as I forgot my password, etc. I will be putting it in my planner from now on.

I would love some ideas from people about good books to use for beginning readers. I would love to use mentor texts with my reading groups but all of my students are very low. Any ideas? I have been using the Sonday system as well as learning how to use EdMark. However, both systems are so rote that it would be fun to do something more creative.

February!!

Wow! I can't believe it is already the third quarter!! Where does the time go? Also, I want to apologize to my fellow bloggers, that I have been slacking. I need to write this in my planner!!

Anyway, I love the beginning of a new quarter (it's like a whole new year). This quarter I really want my class to focus on their reading goals. I think they are so important. They write goals every quarter, but this quarter I want to make them more substantial. Any ideas or thoughts??? Also, as a personal goal, I need to become more organized and manage my time better! Any ideas there???

January Post

One way to manage/take notes on my strategy groups that is working well for me, is writing a quick note of M (meets), P (progressing), NP (not progressing). I write this by each student's name under what the goal is for that lesson/day/week. This gives me a quick way to record what I was thinking for that specific student and to keep track on how they are doing towards meeting the goal in group that I have set.

January!

What a busy month! This month I am really trying to get a better handle on all the ancedotal records. I am trying to keep up with the daily notetaking during guided reading, writer's workshop, independent reading, and strategy groups. However, I am feeling a little overwhelmed with all of the notes, and am realizing I can't get to all of these areas in a half day!Any suggestions?!

November Post-Way overdue! OPS!

So I realized that I have not made a post in awhile.
It's really great to see that everyone is getting their blogs up and going.
I am still working on weekly assessments. Now, I am focussing more on my anedotal records and keeping my binder updated. My goal is to work with the students who are not progressing or below grade level with their MAP scores for reading.
I know that we are also supposed to use other data to help. What kind of data are you using? What has been affective for you?

December Blog

So... I am a little late on my December post...that month is just crazy!!! I hope you all had a nice break and are back into the routine. My question if for those readers that continue to struggle. I am currently working with some kids that do not know all of their letter sounds so we are working on sounds and blending. I feel like I have been working with them both in intervention and within the classroom on this skill. Do you start to move on and switch up the skills and startegies with your struggling readers or do you continue to work on these skills until mastery and then move on. There is so much to cover with these students, but I don't want to bore them either with the same skill focus.