Group items tagged

Slideshare by Emily Kissner gives good explanations of various text structures, and why they are important to teach to students. Also included are examples of books which can be used to teach the structure.

Thank you for sharing this! I often struggle with explaining these concepts to my team's content teachers. Perhaps this would help me to outline the text structures they most frequently provide to students and how best to teach them.

This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.

I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!

Literacy

Journal #1 I really like this article because it spoke to my content area, social studies. I think it is important that students understand how they read a novel for English will be different than reading a history textbook or a newspaper article, and therefore require a different strategy. I use primary and secondary documents, as well as text books, and so students sometimes struggle with comprehension of these different materials. I also use Supreme Court case documents and students have difficulty with those especially. Part of it is vocabulary, but part of it they really don't have a strategy for figuring it out. I think providing them with a strategy of how newspaper articles are structured vs. text books would be very helpful for those learners who have difficulty understanding what they are reading. I was also happy to find out that there is a website that I can access that may assist me with helping teach literacy for social studies. Yea!

This article also provides concrete examples of students reading history like historians, which is really important. And text structure and features defintely plays into this as well. I am so glad you found something meaningful for you as a teacher and learner! Nice use of tags! (Is this for your Journal #1?)

LeAnn, I also think it is very important that students read a textbook differently from the way they would read a novel. Having students take on the persona of a Historian I believe would help them better understand history and how it went about developing our country and our pasts as well. That is wonderful that you are searching for ways to make a more meaningful connection between the students and history textbooks.

With classrooms becoming more and more mainstreamed I thought that this article/website would help general education teacher understand how to create a Behavior Intervention Plan. This text focuses more on kids with autism which I found to be important because of the increased awareness of students with this disability. Student with autism can be a challenge for any teacher to teach. The skills that they usually can be taught are social, daily living, and task skills. One way to help in assisting teachers and the students in doing this is creating behavior intervention plans. With autistic students we need to use special strategies to teach them these skills and the behavior intervention plans provide that strategy. There are several steps that go into the behavior intervention plans that ensure that the students get the most out of the plan. First the teacher will need to record the student's behavior. The behaviors the teacher is looking for are problem behaviors like biting and throwing objects and skill behaviors like language or social skills. Also the teacher will need to record the frequency, duration, and time of these behaviors. Next would be an ABC analysis of the student. The A part means antecedent, what happened before the behavior. The B part would require an analysis of the behavior itself. The C part would be the consequence of the behaviors or what happened after. Following this be choosing a target for the student or goal such as choosing 1-2 skill behaviors and 1 problem behavior to work on. The last few steps include choosing a Right Intervention Strategy for the student with autism. This could include choosing reinforcement such as sensory time, making a structured schedule, and consistent intervention to any issues. In the end you should always continue to analyze the behavior intervention plan.

This article gives several ideas of activities that can be used to help increase reading comprehension with special education students, but they are designed for different learning styles and, I think, would work well with all students! The article is structured as a simple number for each activity so it's very easy to follow. Ideas suggested here fall into the Bloom's Taxonomy of questions and can be used with picture books, short stories, novels or individualized reading for students of all ages. Many ideas do not involve written answers which work best with students with learning difficulties. The activities listed promote comprehension.

"Thinking Maps, developed by Dr. David Hyerle, are visual teaching tools that foster and encourage lifelong learning. They are based on a simple yet profound insight: The one common instructional thread that binds together all teachers, from pre-kindergarten through postgraduate, is that they all teach the same thought processes."

Graphic organizers is our topic for Monday, March 12.

Barrett-Mynes, J., Moran, M. J., & Tegano, D. (2010). Supporting struggling readers using interactive read-alouds and graphic organizers. Voices of Practitioners, 5(2), 1-12. This article discusses a four week study that was done in order to determine the effects that collaborative discussion and child-created graphic organizers used during read-alouds had on children's comprehension. Over the course of the study it was found that: 1. The children need less guidance from their teacher and became more collaborative with their peers in their discussions. 2. The use of graphic organizers became more child-created and required less teacher guidance. 3. Students in the study received higher scores on standardized tests. The article concludes that both collaborative discussions and child-created graphic organizers enable students to construct new knowledge and begin to organize their thinking in response to the comprehension of text. It was also found that by depending less on the the teacher for guidance, children were able to take more control and ownership of their learning. When I taught first and second grade, I loved using graphic organizers and read-alouds to help build reading and comprehension skills. I liked the fact that graphic organizers can be as creative and/or as structured as you would like. The most important factor for me is that graphic organizers can be used with any subject to help a child organizer their learning in a way that is helpful for them as learners.

I agree, it seems like the student's in the study would have had to have some prior experience with graphic organizers to be able to create their own. I loved using graphic organizers in my classroom, although with 1st and 2nd graders they were primarily teacher guided, I think that they were helpful for students to organizer their thoughts and be able to have a visual representation.

In first/second grade it is absolutely appropriate for the teacher to guide and scaffold the student use of graphic organizers.